I’m a web developer it wouldn’t occur to me to edit my CSS each time I update the HTML content. I didn’t want to spend time on the presentation each time I updated the content. For this reason, I wanted to focus on the content and on the appearance independently. I intended to release a first version of the book ASAP, then iterate thanks to readers’ feedback and new ideas I had. Since it was about coding, I also wanted to include some source code examples with syntax highlighting.īust most of all, I wanted an efficient workflow. So I imagined a very custom design, with a dark theme and many colors (it is not designed to be printed). I wanted my last eBook to be a practical guide, not an academic manual. Note: since I wrote this post, I converted all by book content to an interactive course, solving some of the questions I asked myself in the conclusion. After some trial and errors, in the end, I used the same recipe as the two previous ones, and it involves a fantastic tool: Pandoc. Here is the story of how I built my eBooks, especially the last one.

You have to care about creating beautiful files to release: PDF, ePub, Kindle… But the content is not everything when you write an eBook. I would be terrible at talking about writing techniques, so I won’t. In the past four years, I wrote three eBooks about programming.

Pandoc pdf to epub