TITLE: Dependencies and Customizable Books
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: January 29, 2019 1:46 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
Shriram Krishnamurthi, in
Books as Software:
I have said that a book is a collection of components.
I have concrete evidence that some of my users
specifically excerpt sections that suit their purpose.
...
I forecast that one day, rich document formats like PDF
will recognize this reality and permit precisely such
specifications. Then, when a user selects a group of
desired chapters to generate a thinner volume, the
software will automatically evaluate constraints and
include all dependencies. To enable this we will even
need "program" analyses that help us find all the
dependencies, using textual concordances as a starting
point and the index as an auxiliary data structure.
I am one of the users Krishnamurthi speaks of, who has
excerpted sections from his
Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation
to suit the purposes of my course. Though I've not written
a book, I do post, use, adapt, and reuse detailed lecture
notes for my courses, and as a result I have seen both sides
of the divide he discusses. I occasionally change the order
of topics in a course, or add a unit, or drop a unit. An
unseen bit of work is to account for the dependencies among
concepts, examples, problems, and code in the affected
sections, but also in the new whole. My life is simpler
than book writers who have to deal at least in part with
rich document formats: I do everything in a small, old-style
subset of HTML, which means I can use simple text-based
tools for manipulating everything. But dependencies? Yeesh.
Maybe I need to write a big
makefile
for my course notes. Alas, that would not help me manage
dependencies in the way I'd like, or in the way Krishnamurthi
forecasts. As such, it would probably make things worse. I
suppose that I could create the tool I need.
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