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I'm currently working on my third book, a book about neural networks and deep learning. Here's the first chapter:

http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/chap1.html

It'll be free online once complete, but I raised money with an Indiegogo campaign (about 10k). I'm self-publishing, in part because I wanted full control over the book. This gives me the ability to experiment with in-text videos, and with other tricks. For instance, when a reader clicks on an equation reference in the text, the relevant equation appears in the margin, as a reminder. Clicking on the marginal equation will take you to the context in which the equation originally appeared. This cuts down on tedious back-and-forth.

My two earlier books were both published in the traditional way:

+ A book for general audiences about networked science, "Reinventing Discovery: the New Era of Networked Science": http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691160198 Published by Princeton University Press.

+ A textbook about quantum computing, jointly with Ike Chuang: http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computation-Information-Annive... Published by Cambridge University Press. No e-book at all when first published (2000)!

Both were written with LaTeX, and included many illustrations. "Reinventing Discovery" was actually rekeyed entirely by the publisher, but the textbook was produced from our LaTeX copy.



Hi Michael, I didn't know you were on HN! For those who don't know, "Nielsen and Chuang" is the bible of the field of quantum information science.

The eqref-expanded-in-margin is a very cool idea. It could probably make sense for referencable environments like theorems and lemmas.

Do you have any recommendation for the .tex --> .html conversion?


You may want to check out pandoc[1]. It's what I'm using for conversions for a book I'm writing.

[1] http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/


For tex -> html I use Mathjax to do the hard work, and a hand-rolled script to do the rest. I'm starting to experiment with d3 and AngularJS for features beyond what LaTeX alone can offer.


Would you have any resources to recommend in regards to using LaTeX? I work with plain-text source as my default (Markdown, etc.), but haven't used LaTeX specifically.


I use a pretty vanilla LaTeX setup - edit in emacs, display using Yap, and version control with Git and (sometimes) Github. I use the MikTeX distribution for Windows, but use few advanced features - for me, LaTeX is pretty good out of the box.


Thanks!




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