On: Things I learned writing my first technical book

[tibbar]

> Mind maps are a great visualization tool. Use them smartly

I’m curious about this, since my experience with mind maps is that they rapidly grow into giant overly-connected graphs that are very difficult to translate to the sort of linear structure a book or blog post needs. What is OP’s workflow for connecting the two?

[csbartus → tibbar]

I ran in the same issue. And I've created Coco - a Content-as-Code framework to split large graphs / mind maps into small, understandable chunks.

You can take a look at how Coco works here: http://metamn.io/react/on-design-systems-3/ (All figures except the first were made with Coco)

[klavik → tibbar]

Check out OrgPad if you want to see an evolution of mind maps which is actually useful for serious work. For example this single diagram explains why Clojure is great: https://orgpad.com/s/oirCrD.

[danbst → tibbar]

Partly related, the No Bullshit Guide to Linear Algebra has a concept map as a first page, which looks really stunning. Author definitely had spent time mindmapping stuff before writing.

https://minireference.com/miniref/lib/tpl/miniref/dist/image...

[viebel → tibbar]

Author here: In my book, I used mind maps to let the readers visualize a high level summary of a chapter. Here is an example of such a mind map: https://twitter.com/viebel/status/1469187345580793860

[throw349v → viebel]

What software did you use to create the mindmap?

[viebel → throw349v]

Lucidchart

[asplake → tibbar]

Yep. Half the fun/challenge of writing a book (I’m on my fourth) is finding the right linear sequence.

[viebel → asplake]

Author here: More challenge than fun!