With the changes to the book and my plans to develop a Second Edition, I also want to change the toolchain I’m using. When I wrote the book for O’Reilly back in 2011, I used DocBook XML as the source. However, these days I’m typically working in Markdown or another lightweight text markup format. So step one for the Second Edition is to migrate the DocBook XML into another format.

My current thinking is to use AsciiDoc, as it has support for footnotes and admonitions (ex. “Warning”), neither of which are supported in most Markdown variants. I’m still working through some plans, but hope to have the book converted over in the next few weeks. (I would welcome feedback on other text formats.)

I’m planning to make the book text available in a GitHub repository so that others can see the text and perhaps offer comments and feedback. If you would like to be notified when I do that, please sign up on my email list.