I'm writing a book
I've decided to write a book about the amazing blog-aware, static site generator Jekyll.
Over the past few weeks, I've been really looking at the traffic on my site. According to the analytics I'm seeing, the pages that deal specifically with Jekyll related topics consistently sit at the top of the list.
That got me thinking; why are so many people looking for answers? So I went searching.
What I found is that there aren't a lot of tutorials or guides that walk you through everything I think you need to know. Sure, there are some pretty good ones, but I want to take it a step further.
Not only do I want to cover all of the features that come with Jekyll, I also want to cover some advanced topics like adding comments via Disqus, or building plugin, or getting code highlighting set up.
I want to write the book in such a way that someone who only has HTML and CSS knowledge could learn to use Jekyll. One of the things that I see a lot with the other tutorials out there is that they assume the reader has prior programming knowledge.
What I'm finding is that a lot of people who have reached out to me are not programmers. They know that using a tool like Jekyll can save them time, but they get lost.
I'm hoping that with this book - or rather, advanced tutorial - I will be able to find the right amount of "hand holding" but also have enough to win over seasoned programmers.
The book will be written against Jekyll 2.0. I've got the 30,000 foot view of the book laid out and have even started fleshing out a few chapters. I see the book being in 3 parts: intro, core features, advanced topics.
The intro section will cover the basics like who the book is for, information about me, installing Jekyll, and building a site with the default generator. This is the "hello, world" section of the book.
The core features section will cover building a site from scratch using Jekyll. I want to focus on the functionality that comes packed in Jekyll without any external dependencies or plugins. I don't think people realize just how powerful the core feature-set of Jekyll really is.
Finally, the advanced features section will be a "choose your own adventure" layout for the chapters. Each chapter will cover a specific topic like adding comments to posts, adding code highlighting, or writing your own plugin. Readers can pick and choose which chapters they want to read and in any order they want to read them.
I'm really excited about this and would love to hear what people think. Right now, I'm thinking about selling the book for around $25. I'll also have a free version that will have enough to, hopefully, help you decide that the price is worth it.
Let me know what you think. Is this something you'd be interested in?