The Best of Hack and /: Linux Admin Crash Course is published!

This book doesn't aim to be an exhaustive guide to everything you need to know to be a system administrator. Instead, this book allows me to act as a remote mentor to someone starting out in IT or system administration whether as a full-time job or as a full stack developer.

It's available in premium hardcover, paperback, and ebook forms here:
https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/kyle_rankin

#writing #SelfPublishing #linux #publishing

Thanks to the excellent suggestion from @agx, I have created a sample chapter for the book. A link is available on the product page for each version of the book, or you can check it out directly here:

https://kylerank.in/bohs_lacc_sample_chapter.pdf

#writing #linux #publishing #SelfPublishing

@kyle

What software did you use for layout?

@jebba I used vim and LaTeX.

@kyle @jebba nice, my book is using emacs (ooh err editor wars) and LaTeX.

You really cannot go wrong with just how beautifully LaTeX can lay things out.

@ljs @jebba With the help of a few macros (which I'm sure you also set up in EMACS), it is *very* fast to format a book compared to GUI tools or Word/LibreOffice templates. Most of the text for this book was already written other than some front material and chapter intros. Learning LaTex, iterating through formatting, editing, indexing, and waiting for page proofs to arrive took less than 4 weeks from start to book launch.

@kyle @jebba oh yeah it's massively better than trying to fiddle with a WYSIWYG setup.

My only issue is that if a chapter drags on in size build times get silly, but I split the chapters up and just \input them.

Oh and TikZ is fab. Have a bunch of diagrams that look nice and you can represent basically anything.

I have set things up so it has links to code throughout but also generates a list of source code at the end for a possible print edition.

At ~660 pages now and no signs of any issues (though FULL BOOK build times long lol)

@kyle @jebba God I hate pasting stuff here because I instantly see things that could be tweaked 🤣

The editing phase of this is going to be fun... another year of writing first though pretty much.

@ljs @kyle

Heh, I go to different computers in different rooms and use different viewers (and different colored glasses!) to check things. Pasting it in a browser does that too. ;)

@jebba @kyle key (and hardest) thing is just writing the damn thing. Tweaks can come later.

Ultimately by its nature a lonely process

@ljs @jebba This is why I like the LaTeX workflow. If you are using a publisher's Word/LibreOffice template, the temptation is to write the book directly in the formatting tool, so your writing ends up being interrupted by formatting.

With $text_editor + LaTeX, I can focus on the writing first (I do basic formatting hints in markdown). This lets me write the full draft and keep my focus on the writing before I worry about layout and formatting.