How to read this book
As far as the features go, you can:
- toggle the chapter menu by clicking on the cheeseburger menu on top left:
- search the book using the magnifying glass:
- turn pages by clicking the left and right angles:
- You can also navigate by using your keyboard's left and right arrows.
- On the top right of the page, you can visit its Github repository, where the source code lives.
This book was generated using a Rust program called mdBook. Well, it'll ‘technically’ be wrong to call it a "Book" because mdBook turns the written text1into a website! That's a pretty big deal because with this little tool a public domain book may reach any device that could open a browser — a laptop, desktop, tablet or even a smartphone — no matter if it is an Apple device or one from Google or even what type of Browser 2, you may choose to use. Thus, it would be appropriate to call it a “web app” , that has several goodies baked in. It handles the layout and responsive design so my focus can lie on the content of this book instead of the architecture of the site. At the same time, this application, keeps the essential book experience intact. Particularly on a tablet 3or even on a smartphone browser.
It even supports the foot 4notes :-)
mdBook takes the text written in markdown format to publish it through the web app. markDown is an open source implementation that allows conversion of text into html format through a set of simple notations.
Because of limited resources, I only use ‘Google Chrome’ for testing. Expectation is it should work on all browsers but all the features may not be available on older ones such as w3m or elinks that don't support javascipt natively.
This book was “designed” for ‘in-browser’ reading experience on an Apple or Android tablet. It should work pretty well on kindle browser as well, if you want to read it in the bright sun light, though you will need an internet connection. Of course it will work fine on a laptop browser - duh:-)
When you click on the foot note marker in the main text, it brings you down to the relevant note at the bottom. You can always press the browser back arrow on computer (or on tablet) to get back to where you were reading - back to the foot note mark in the main text. Isn't that lot better than reading a paper book!
Modern web-apps, offer a multitude of 'Themes' - the fonts, color combinations, and the font sizes. It is almost impossible to review the text though all the possible combinations. Thus a time-pressed editor must choose one to preview the write ups (:- . It was much easier in older times when all books had the same white-ish color and all words were mostly a shade of black :-)