netzzwerg / gitbook

Command line utility for generating books and exercises using GitHub/Git and Markdown

GitBook

GitBook is a command line tool (and Node.js library) for building beautiful programming books and exercises using GitHub/Git and Markdown. You can see an example: Learn Javascript.

How to use it:

GitBook can be installed from NPM using:

$ npm install gitbook -g

You can serve a repository as a book using:

$ gitbook serve ./repository

Or simply build the static website using:

$ gitbook build ./repository --output=./outputFolder

Options for commands build and serve are:

-t, --title <name> Name of the book to generate, defaults to repo name
-i, --intro <intro> Description of the book to generate
-g, --github <repo_path> ID of github repo like : username/repo

Book Format

A book is a GitHub repository containing at least 2 files: README.md and SUMMARY.md.

README.md

As usual, it should contains an introduction for your book. It will be automatically added to the final summary.

SUMMARY.md

The SUMMARY.md defines your book's structure. It should contain a list of chapters, linking to their respective pages.

Example:

# Summary

This is the summary of my book.

* [section 1](section1/README.md)
    * [example 1](section1/example1.md)
    * [example 2](section1/example2.md)
* [section 2](section2/README.md)
    * [example 1](section2/example1.md)

Files that are not included in the SUMMARY.md will not be processed by gitbook.

Exercises

A book can contain interactive exercises (currently only in Javascript but Python and Ruby are coming soon ;) ). An exercise is a code challenge provided to the reader, which is given a code editor to write a solution which is checked against the book author's validation code.

An exercise is defined by 4 simple parts:

• Exercise Message/Goals (in markdown/text)
• Initial code to show to the user, providing a starting point
• Solution code, being a correct solution to the exercise
• Validation code that tests the correctness of the user's input

Exercises need to start and finish with a separation bar (--- or ***). It should contain 3 code elements (base, solution and validation).

---

Define a variable `x` equal to 10.

```js
var x = 
```

```js
var x = 10;
```

```js
assert(x == 10);
```

---