Designing your own book is a mindbending experience (something that songwriters who author both music and lyrics would probably agree with). In my book, I tried to make the text look rich but consistent, pleasantly dense but varied. Some of the solutions that I came up with may deserve a few words. Running in from aside. Three levels of numbered headings are used within each chapter. In addition, unnumbered bold run-in headings are often used (as in this paragraph) to break the text into even smaller, manageable pieces. Semantically, the run-ins are closer to margin notes than headings; usually their goal is not to state the subject but to provide a remark, an aside, a metaphor related to the topic of discussion. Hopefully these run-in headings are memorable enough to serve as landmarks facilitating navigation. Small but not least. Some paragraphs, with or without run-in headings, are set in a smaller type. They present material that may be skipped in the first reading without any damage to understanding. You can treat the smaller-type fragments as extended footnotes or sidebars. Cross-references. Bold gray numbers (such as 3.9 ) refer to numbered sections of the book. The running headers and footers should make it easy to find the referenced sections; however, for references that jump especially far, page numbers are also provided. Syntax coloring without colors. Unlike most computer books with code listings, this one makes use of a concept that has long been commonplace in text editors: syntax coloring. Of course, a black-and-white book page is not really capable of color (except for shades of gray), but instead it can freely use font faces that usually look nicer on paper than on a computer screen. Thus, I have attempted to make code in the book at least as readable as it is in a good text editor by consistently "coloring" syntactic constructions with different font faces. Essential URLs. All web addresses are given in footnotes in an abbreviated form without http:// , index.html , or trailing slashes . Slash what? I use forward slashes (/) and not backslashes (\) as directory separators for both Windows and Unix (the latter including Mac OS X). The rationale is simple: Forward slashes are standard on Unix and in URLs, and most Windows tools understand both kinds of slashes anyway. |