GiBook is a command line tool (and Node.js library) for building beautiful programming books and exercises using GitHub/Git and Markdown. You can see an example: Learn Javascript.

How to use it:

GitBook can be installed from NPM using:

$ npm install gitbook -g

You can serve a repository as a book using:

$ gitbook serve ./repository

Or simply build the static website using:

$ gitbook build ./repository --output=./outputFolder

Options for commands build and serve are:

-t, --title <name> Name of the book to generate, defaults to repo name
-i, --intro <intro> Description of the book to generate
-g, --github <repo_path> ID of github repo like : username/repo

Book Format

A book is a GitHub repository containing at least 2 files: README.md and SUMMARY.md.

README.md

As usual, it should contains an introduction for your book. It will be automatically added to the final summary.

SUMMARY.md

The SUMMARY.md is used for getting the complete summary of the book. It should contains a list of items (deep items are allowed) with links to the different pages.

Example:

# Summary

This is the summary of my book.

* [section 1](section1/README.md)
    * [example 1](section1/example1.md)
    * [example 2](section1/example2.md)
* [section 2](section2/README.md)
    * [example 1](section2/example1.md)

All the other content than the summary list will be ignored.

Exercises

A book can contains interactive exercises (currently only in Javascript but Python and Ruby are coming soon ;) ).

An exercise is defined by 3 different parts:

Exercise Message/Goals (in markdown/text)
Base code to show to the user
Solution to show to the user when he gives up
Validation code for testing the result of the user input

Exercises need to start and finish with a separation bar (````---or***```). It should contain 3 code elements (base, solution and validation).

---

Define a variable `x` which equal to 10.

```js
var x = 
```

```js
var x = 10;
```

```js
assert(x == 10);
```

---