[Edu-sig] Writing books/manuals containing code

[Peter Bowyer]

At 04:38 02/09/2005, Dethe Elza wrote:
>If you are on OS X there is even a reST- specific editor[2] which 
>transforms to XHTML as you go, for WYSIWYG- ish goodness.

A bit of searching found one for all platforms available: DocFactory 
- http://docutils.sourceforge.net/sandbox/gschwant/docfactory/doc/

I'm not convinced about reST from the examples I've seen, but I will 
certainly play with it.  I think it's one of those things you have to 
*get* before it makes sense (and Leo even more so).  It seems 
counter-intuitive to drop back to plain text with syntax.  One 
question I do have about it, is can you extend the syntax with your 
own modifiers etc?

Does anyone know how publishers such as O'Reilly have their books 
written?  When I read the Pragmatic Programmer's guide to Ruby I 
noted at the front they say the code results in their book are actual 
output - the code is executed every time the book was generated.  Is 
anyone familiar with the systems for doing this?

For the number of books and manuals being written I've found very 
little in the way of guides on different set-ups people use.

Peter

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