The guidebook for “Have you opened a book lately?”, a presentation I delivered at the Central Pennsylvania Open Source Conference, has been published here. The guidebook supported the presentation, which explored the motivations and means for authoring books with “open” copyright. The difference in gratis and libre philosophies were contrasted, as well as business models that help support open book authors.
Attendees learned about Shaw’s learn-x-the-hard-way framework and how Python, dexy, reStructuredText, LaTeX, and more come together to make a publication-ready technical book. Deployment options for HTML and PDF were demonstrated.
The guidebook can be viewed here and the workshop’s source code is available. The workshop was conducted without presentation slides; the guidebook served as the presentation. The site relies on reStructuredText for content, Python for code samples and graph generation, and Dexy for bundling everything into HTML.
This project is based loosely on the learn-x-the-hard-way framework by Zed Shaw.
Content may be used with permission.