paulwilke/amber-book

A book about Amber Smalltalk

Amber Book

Clone the repo and then do:

# get a Pharo VM and Pillar

./download.sh

# for Ubuntu and to get PDFs (TeXLive is 1.6 gigs, you have been warned)

sudo apt-get install texlive-full

You can compile the book with:

./compile.sh

The contents of the chapters are in Book/

Pillar Book Skeleton

This is a skeleton that can be used as a starting place to write your book. For now on this it is being used by PharoForTheEnterprise and UpdatedPharoByExample books.

You should replace this intro and first two sections with a nice information about your book :)

What is Skeleton

Pillar Book Skeleton provides a predefined structure for source files, as well as usefull scripts to write books with Pillar markup.

How to use Skeleton

• Fork this repository, and start writing your book (explained in the next section).

• Customise pillar.conf with your book's title.

• Add this repository as a remote:

  git remote add skeleton https://github.com/pillar-markup/book-skeleton.git

• Then you want to get updates from this repository execute:

  git pull skeleton master

  You will have to resolve conflicts if updates occurred in the lines that you've changed.

Continuous Integration suggestions

If you want your book to be built automatically (e.g., by Jenkins), you have to configure the job to execute these lines:

./download.sh
./compile.sh

and then to archive these artefacts:

Book.pdf, Book.tex, **/*.pillar, **/*.pillar.tex, **/*.pillar.pdf, **/*.pillar.html,  **/*.pillar.md, **/figures/*, html/**

Also Skeleton comes with Travis CI configuration file. This allows you to start automated testing of your book just by enabling it on Travis CI service. Finally you can follow Sharing Travis-CI generated files tutorial, to hack GitHub and Travis into storing your artefacts.

How to write a book

This book is written in Pillar markup. If you are not familiar with it please check the pillar-documentation.

###Generating the book

First of all you have to run ./download.sh to obtain the Pillar executable that does all the job.

To generate your book execute ./compile.sh. If you want to generate only one chapter, pass the file's path to the script: ./compile.sh Example/Example.pillar. If you have pdflatex installed and available in your system's PATH, the script will also generate pdf files.

###Adding a chapter

To add a chapter create a directory for it (named, e.g., Example) and put there a .pillar file (named, e.g., Example.pillar) which will contain the chapter itself. Put images in the figures subdirectory of the new chapter directory.

Add your chapter to:

• pillar.conf in the inputFiles array as: "Example/Example.pillar", and
• _support/templates/book.latex.template in \graphicspath as {Example/}

###Caveats

• You must neither use spaces nor underscores (_) in file names.

Tools

There are mods/bundles/packages for text editors, that provide improvements for pillar files editing:

• Emacs: pillar-mode
• Vim: vim-pillar
• TextMate: Pillar.tmbundle
• ATOM: language-pillar