I’ve been working on this for nearly two years. I originally aimed to complete it before my son was born, but he’s now 16 months old. Go figure. Seems like writing a book is harder than it looks. My original motivation was to write something I would want to read since most resources I found on self-hosting were either too shallow, lacked real-world examples like code, or didn’t fully address the knowledge gaps I kept running into.
The book starts with the basics and builds up to covering the full infrastructure stack, with the goal of understanding the system as a whole and eventually deploying on Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a major focus but the content can be applied to any environment. I can't express this clearly, but you should probably check the sample "Jobs and CronJobs" section to get an idea. There’s also a section on best practices, tips, and practical details based on things I’ve run into myself.
It is available for free including the PDF and the code blocks. Yet, you are welcome to pay what you want.
Congratulations, that's an impressive achievement. I've successfully evaded learning anything about Kubernetes this far, but I guess this is a good opportunity to see what I've been missing.
PDF isn't optimized for that, like now, reading the article a phone, I couldn't properly check out a chapter because PDF is awful in optimizing itself for a smaller screen
Yep. I would prefer to see an epub version, which would be readable on more devices with different form factors, plus you could change the fonts and spacing etc.
Any? PDF is fixed-width and is currently laid out for desktop, so bigger than any phone - though even there, you might want to use the guide side-by-side with your actual host shell to follow some instructions - and hit the same limitation on a smaller laptop screen where text wouldn't fit and you'd have to scroll.
no, it's not. pdf has multiple rendering modes and your problem is the client you are using to view it.
the reason this book being ~20 mb with 750 pages is that %99 percent of the things inside is vectoral, including the variable font that I used. While trying to find the perfect page aspect ratio and the perfect variable font width, I tried it with many different screen sizes, operating systems, dpis etc and clearly tell you that you have another problem.
For me, it's any device/app: Windows with Chrome/Firefox, Sumatra, PDXChange, iphone Safari, Mac Preview/Skim
The chapter looks identical, the first line of chapter 5 is "In the previous chapter, we covered the basics of the Linux operating" and it doesn't reflow when you change zoom on any device, as is pdf-typical, unlike your website where zooming in never loses the "A complete roadmap from Linux foundations to production-grade Kubernetes." text.
But instead of troubleshooting my case, just tell what the ideal client program that breaks the curse of PDF is! I'll even try the Acrobat monstrosity if it's the only one
Tried to check it out but can't comment on the contents, because gumroad is apparently the intersection of facebook, cloudflare and google and specializes in serving millions of captcha's, then when solving all of them bluntly tells the transaction could not complete. There is a special place in hell for sites like gumroad.
Thank you so much for such a useful book, I really appreciate what you did! But please add alternative payment methods to thank you, I don't trust leaving credit card details on third-party services
So why not break it up into smaller bits? You could probably do that fairly easily with an LLM - I get that you don't want AI slop, but this would be more about helping you structure it into more publishable sizes/topics and would be your words.
The book starts with the basics and builds up to covering the full infrastructure stack, with the goal of understanding the system as a whole and eventually deploying on Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a major focus but the content can be applied to any environment. I can't express this clearly, but you should probably check the sample "Jobs and CronJobs" section to get an idea. There’s also a section on best practices, tips, and practical details based on things I’ve run into myself.
It is available for free including the PDF and the code blocks. Yet, you are welcome to pay what you want.
Can you add a machine-readable table of contents to your book? The Firefox PDF reader calls it a "document outline".
This allows navigation using the outline with a PDF reader.
This PDF has an example of such an outline: https://web.mit.edu/6.001/6.037/sicp.pdf
PDF isn't optimized for that, like now, reading the article a phone, I couldn't properly check out a chapter because PDF is awful in optimizing itself for a smaller screen
the reason this book being ~20 mb with 750 pages is that %99 percent of the things inside is vectoral, including the variable font that I used. While trying to find the perfect page aspect ratio and the perfect variable font width, I tried it with many different screen sizes, operating systems, dpis etc and clearly tell you that you have another problem.
But instead of troubleshooting my case, just tell what the ideal client program that breaks the curse of PDF is! I'll even try the Acrobat monstrosity if it's the only one
Had to search but it seems that lulu allows 800 pages so your book can fit just right in
There are definitely some other publishers like No Starch Press who might help ya as well.
Since I spend so much time, I decided to let people read it.
Additionally, I’ve spent so much energy writing it that I didn’t want to deal with that.
Thanks for creating this book!