Writing a nonfiction history book with (mostly) Linux and FOSS
Quoting: Writing a nonfiction history book with (mostly) Linux and FOSS —
I've been writing books for over 30 years now. I began publishing them in 2011. So far, I unleashed 21 books unto the wild. By and large, fiction is super easy to write. You just use your own head. Even my technical works on kernel crash analysis, problem solving, ethics, or career help were relatively simple to jot down. Recently, though, I had completed my most ambitious project yet. A military history book.
Nonfiction is hard. You cannot wing it, use your experience or imagination. You must work with references, tons and tons of them, read other books, you must use citations, and so forth. Well, for the past three months, I have engrossed myself into this ultra-complex endeavor. Now, it's done. The book weighs 90K words, it has some 35 figures and tables, each, plus almost 700 citations. It also includes a piece of simulation code, for a specific combat scenario, written in Matlab-like octave. And I did all of this work using Linux and Linux tools. Well, 90% of the work. Let me tell you more. Linux from the perspective of a seasoned author with fifteen million words under their belt.