I wrote a book in Markdown—Here’s How It Went

I’ve been working with Markdown and Git for a while now, sharing my knowledge by giving talks and posting articles on Medium. I decided to put some Markdown recipes together in a book — and in that case, why not put my money where my mouth is and write the book in Markdown? This is the story of how I created Markdown Dreams: How to do things with Markdown and Git. Spoiler alert: I ended up using a lot of the techniques that I describe in the book itself.

Choose your weapon

I decided to workshop the book as a documentation website first, so that I could get feedback from a few friends along the way. I had just set up a Raspberry Pi with a web server, Git, and a few other tools, so that I could have a tiny always-on server for small projects and experiments. I decided to see what tools were available to write the book on this tiny computer. I found that the 64-bit ARM version of Ubuntu supported Ghostwriter, MdDocs, Pandoc, and Git — just the tools I needed.

The day-to-day

Writing in Ghostwriter was very easy. I broke the book outline into small individual files and folders to make each topic distinct and easy to work on. Markdown syntax is easy to get used to, and I believe that even a beginner would find it natural fairly quickly.