Misc/abrash-black-book
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James Gregory 44ba18363a Final change for version 1.0. 
Spelling correction in README and copyright.
2014-01-19 16:37:41 +11:00
epub Remove date from title page 2014-01-19 16:03:45 +11:00
html Remove date from title page 2014-01-19 16:03:45 +11:00
images Use redrawn high-res cover 2014-01-19 16:01:28 +11:00
src Final change for version 1.0. 2014-01-19 16:37:41 +11:00
Makefile Don't generate the epub as part of a mobi run 2014-01-19 16:25:01 +11:00
README.md Final change for version 1.0. 2014-01-19 16:37:41 +11:00

README.md

Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book

This is the source for an ebook version of Michael Abrash's Black Book of Graphics Programming (Special Edition), originally published in 1997 and released online for free in 2001.

Reproduced with permission of Michael Abrash, converted and maintained by James Gregory.

How does this differ from the previously released versions?

The book is now out of print, and hard to come by. Last time I checked it was going for over $200 on ebay.

The version which Michael and Dr. Dobbs released in 2001 was as a collection PDFs. This version is still available; however, the structure (multiple files) and the format (PDF) doesn't lend itself well to reading on a ebook reader or other mobile device.

This version has been thoroughly cleaned of artefacts and condensed into something which can be easily converted into a ebook friendly format. You can read this version online at Github, or download any of the Epub or Mobi releases. You can clone the repository and generate your own version with pandoc if necessary.

Contributing

Changes are welcome, especially conversion related ones. If you spot any issues whilst reading, please submit an issue and I'll correct it. Pull Requests are always welcome.

There's some larger changes that could be made to help preserve the content longer term. I'd love to see some of the images converted to a vector representation so we can provide higher-resolution versions, and similarly formulas and maths could be represented in MathML.

Generating your own ebook

You need to have the following software installed and on your PATH before you begin:

  • pandoc for Markdown to HTML and Epub conversion.
  • kindlegen for Epub to Mobi conversion.

To generate an e-reader friendly version of the book, you can use make with one of the following options:

  • html - build a HTML5 single-page version of the book
  • epub - build an Epub3 ebook
  • mobi - build a Kindle-friendly Mobi
  • all - do all of the above

Once complete, there'll be an out directory with a black-book.epub, a black-book.mobi and a html directory with a black-book.html file.

Note: Generating a mobi requires an epub to already exist. Also, mobi generation can be slow because of compression. If you want a quick mobi conversion you can just run kindlegen out/black-book.epub.