A practical guide to planning, writing, and publishing books that teach skills, technologies, and technical concepts.
This book provides a complete roadmap for writing a technical book from start to finish. It covers every stage of the process: defining your purpose and audience, structuring content for clarity, researching and preparing material, writing effective first drafts, crafting code examples and exercises, using diagrams and formatting, editing and reviewing, choosing tools and workflows, navigating publishing options, marketing your work, maintaining and updating published content, and learning from the experience of successful authors.
The book is organized in 13 chapters that follow the natural lifecycle of a technical book project. The introduction motivates the journey. Chapters 1 through 3 cover planning and preparation. Chapters 4 through 6 focus on writing and content creation. Chapters 7 and 8 address editing and tooling. Chapters 9 through 11 cover publishing, marketing, and long-term maintenance. Chapter 12 closes with practical wisdom from experienced authors.
This book is itself written in the format it recommends: Markdown files organized by chapter, stored in a version-controlled repository. The advice in these pages reflects real-world practices used by technical authors across the industry.