In this repostitory, you will find the chapters written in Markdown. Markdown files are pretty readable, but you may well want to convert the source files into other formats. There is a Makefile that you can use to do that, but you will need various other tools installed. This file explains which tools are required, what they are required for and how to get them.
Make is the standard Unix
tool for controlling how to build files from other files. If you're using a
system based on Unix (that includes Linux, BSD and OSX) then you will almost
certainly alread have Make installed. If you're using Windows, then I think
that Microsoft have a similar tool called nmake which you can almost
certainly download from one of their many web sites.
The first file that we need to generate is the EPUB version of the book. And for that we use a tool called Pandoc. This almost certainly won't already be installed on your system.
For Linux users, Pandoc will be available in your system's package repository.
If you're using a RedHat/Fedora/Centos system you can install it with sudo install pandoc. For a Debian/Ubuntu system, the equivalent command is sudo apt-get install pandoc. If you're using any other kind of Linux then I'm sure
you're clever enough to work out the equivalent command.
For OSX and Windows users, there are installable packages of the latest version of Pandoc available from their Github repository. Simply download the correct file and double-click it.
Once you have Make and Pandoc installed, you can build an EPUB of the book by opening a terminal, changing to the directory where you have checked out a copy of this repository and typing:
make epub
Or, even, just:
make
You will end up with a file called perlwebbook.epub which can be used in many ebook systems.
If you want to generate a copy of the book which you can read on an Amazon Kindle, then you need to go a step further and generate a MOBI version of the file. We do this using a program called Kindlegen which Amazon makes available for many different platforms. You can download the program from their web site.
Once you have installed Kindlegen, you can generate your MOBI file by opening a terminal, changing to the directory where you have checked out a copy of this repository and typing:
make mobi
Note: The MOBI is generated by converting the EPUB. So running make mobi
will automatically run make epub first, which means that you will also need
to install Pandoc as described above.
Sometimes you don't want a real ebook version of the book. Sometimes just a PDF is enough. So our Make system supports building a PDF too.
Building a PDF uses another tool called Calibre which you will need to install if you want to make a PDF.
For Linux users, Calibre will be available in your system's package repository.
If you're using a RedHat/Fedora/Centos system you can install it with sudo install calibre. For a Debian/Ubuntu system, the equivalent command is sudo apt-get install calibre. If you're using any other kind of Linux then I'm
sure you're clever enough to work out the equivalent command,
For OSX and Windows users, there are installable packages of the latest version of Calibre available from their web site. Simply download the correct file and double-click it.
Once you have Calibre installed, you can build a PDF of the book by opening a terminal, changing to the directory where you have checked out a copy of this repository and typing:
make pdf
Note: The PDF is generated by converting the EPUB. So running make mobi
will automatically run make epub first, which means that you will also need
to install Pandoc as described above.
This section summarises the software needed to convert the input files into various output files.
- This repository contains the book's sources in Markdown format.
- An EPUB is created from the Markdown using Pandoc
- A MOBI is created from the EPUB using Kindlegen
- A PDF is created from the EPUB using Calibre
Putting it all together, it looks like this (ebook_convert is the command line program that we use from the Calibre package):
