Ask HN: I'm thinking of writing a book – Why would you want a book? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I'm thinking of writing a book – Why would you want a book?

4 pointsiamflimflam114 comments

As the title says - I’m thinking of writing a book. I’m targeting a quite specific niche - Arduino on the ESP32-S3. I want to take the reader on a journey from the basic blink sketch to designing a custom PCB.

This could just work as a series of YouTube videos or blog posts. But it would be nice to turn this into a physical book. What would make you actually want the book version? What value can a book have above and beyond something online?

Or is a book just a nice to have thing? Should I just focus on creating the content and making sure it’s useful/valuable and treat the book as just another method of presentation?

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I think writing the book is useful for the writer to formulate better what is actually useful, as opposed to blog post which can be put together quite quickly.

There are two sides one can consider, the first is writing a book for people who want to nerd out on Arduino, and one is a book for those who want to build things. I'm looking into Arduino at the moment and what I would find useful is briefly going into why the device functions the way it does, common pitfalls, and generally ways to accelerate the learning so that building things become more about the output than getting stuck in details.

My current thinking is very much on the building side of things. I think the deep detail is out there and I can point out where to go for the ones who want that deep dive.

A lot of people have an idea, but struggle to know where to start as it can be quite overwhelming.

Just laying out potential chapters and seeing how they flow is helping to clarify things.

[Random advice from the internet]

Write a book because you want to write a book and let the chips fall where they may.

Wanting-to-write-a-book often reflects the idea of wanting-to-be-the-kind-of-person-who-writes-books more than it reflects an embracing of the work involved.

Or to put it another way, asking-HN is a lot easier than showing-HN a draft for feedback and if you really want to write a book, you need a draft not a comment thread.

Not that there is anything wrong with not writing a book. It's a lot of hard work for little to no reward other than the work itself.

Good luck.

Thanks! And you’re right, I should get a draft up as soon as possible.

- Books don't run out of battery

- Books can't be remotely revoked or modified by a centralized authority

- Physical books are what's needed for building a proper antilibrary [1]

- I like to own things and you don't own a book unless you possess it in its dead-tree form

- Books can serve as personable gifts and inheritance

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antilibrary

I like books a lot. They are sublime. Go write it. I like the It's Not about Finding Your Niche, It's about Developing [0] article. It took me places. Best of luck!

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37476399

I would love a book on the ESP32! Feel free to email me at hello@taylor.town if you need any early proofreading :)

What may be less risky though is to release videos in the style of Ben Eater. It’s generally a bad idea to pursue books without an agent. YouTube offers a nice way to publish material and grow a fanbase

Once I’ve got a draft table of contents together I’ll drop you an email.

I'd highly recommend reading "Write Useful Books: A modern approach to designing and refining recommendable nonfiction" by Rob Fitzpatrick. Its a super pragmatic tutorial on writing non fiction that folks will actually use

Thanks! Will read it!

What's the story angle/line/tanent/"e"/"pi"/etc.? (linear algegra, Lewis Carol math, Claud, Shannon, etc. ) -- Physical reminder/context for why 'booked ticket to get punched'?

Target audience? -- is journey a story in which 'instructions/learning' are actions used to get the reader to partake in story? aka humanities novel as wrapper to 70's wall of documentation volumes.

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> Should I just focus on creating the content and making sure it’s useful/valuable and treat the book as just another method of presentation?

Is this for a 'Go Forth' TeD book of the month talk?

Any further clarification on type theory / category background? (cs, art, architecture, fonts, LaTex, ascii, utf, ...)

"The Power of Making Thinking Visible: Practices to Engage and Empower All Learners" by Ron Ritchhart (Author), Mark Church (Author)

"The Elements of Style" by William Strunk Jr. (Author), E. B. White (Author)

"Thinking with Type: Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students Paperback" by Ellen Lupton

"Unleash the Power of Storytelling: Win Hearts, Change Minds, Get Results" by Rob Biesenbach

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> ... book just a nice to have thing? Wide variety of catecorical/topi types.

Physicall book can be less expensive / less hassel than mangaging drmo on elecronic tablet/format only to have reference auto-erased. Dont have to worry about battery leaking/exploding. Thankfully, electronic formats allow for circumventing the imaginary wierd mechanics of trying to carry around wall's worth of pearls within multiple physical book encylopedia volumes without spending one's life working out at gym to be able to effortlessly carry/handle the encylopedia volume(s).

Categorical/Topi 'sea' type stuff:

"Alice in Wonderland" by Lewis Carol;

"Alice in Puzzle-Land: A Carrollian Tale for Children Under Eighty" by Raymond M. Smullyan

"To Mock a Mockingbird" by Raymond Smullyan;

"The New Turing Omnibus: Sixty-Six Excursions in Computer Science" by A.K. Dewdney

"Once Upon an Algorithm: How Stories Explain Computing" by Martin Erwig

"The Annotated Gödel: A Reader's Guide to his Classic Paper on Logic and Incompleteness Paperback" by Hal Prince (Author)

"Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas R Hofstadter

"Information Theory: A Tutorial Introduction (2nd Edition)" by James V Stone

"An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise" Subsequent Edition by John R. Pierce

"Coding the Matrix: Linear Algebra through Applications to Computer Science" by Philip N. Klein

"Land of Lisp: Learn to Program in Lisp, One Game at a Time!" by Conrad Barski M.D.

"Build Your Own Lisp" by Mr Daniel Holden

"LISP IS MY FAVORITE LANGUAGE IN LIFE FOUR MONTHS TO LEARN: Funny beginner's noteook to Learn LISP Programming Step-by-Step(PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE)"

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Good questions. My target audience would be people who may be technical, but not in electronics. But they’ve seen what microcontrollers can do and have an idea for a piece of hardware and want to scratch that itch.

So it would be a guide to get you from zero to having a working PCB. Enough basic electronics to get something working and enough background information that a motivated reader would be able to do their own research.

So, "0"-line Hamiltonian story with lead-off in Leeds UK as leed-in to LC_local references without getting to far down the proverbial (alice and wonerland/Matrix) hole? What was the initial bill starting with? Was duck type on the list?[4]

Merkel the details with fibonacci sequences (think coding golf[1] meets snarfle the garthnok[2]). !A pretty basic logic circuit ("0"), but boolean in OCT 31 bit more detailed[0] (ok, at time of writing, not DEC 25 yet). Easy to get the picturee if use L-System sequences, but may be a bit to many subtle pointed references to start the reader off with.

Does wiki/google 'still have lighting/igniting/firing up the imagination' connotations in today's led illuminated world? (or have to block it out with sectorlisp[5] and decent color type scheme[6]

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virtual pcb traces/leads:

diy customized circuit board making : https://www.instructables.com/Making-A-Customized-Circuit-Bo...

why are you still making pcbs? : https://hackaday.com/2015/09/21/why-are-you-still-making-pcb...

! "one-off-diy-pcb-creation-technique" : https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/7003/best-on...

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[0] : No UTF-8/16/32 re-release yet! -> Star Wars Asciimation : https://www.asciimation.co.nz/

      Less DMCA notice potential if skip the SNL Jim Carrey characters.

[1] ; Code golf : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_golf / https://esolangs.org/wiki/Main_Page

[2] : 'snarfle the garthnok' : https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Gnarfle%20th...

[3] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system

[4] : GRBL/Gerbil lisp : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38156382

[5] : https://woodrush.github.io/blog/posts/2022-01-12-lisp-in-lif...

[6] : http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5679

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