This book is currently published at http://mbe.modelica.university. This is an early access version that gives people a chance to comment on the book before making an "official" release. The goal is to collect sufficient feedback that we can move forward with the publication of a paper (printed) version of the book without concerns that the material will still require significant revisions.
If you find an issue with the current version of the book or have a suggestion for improving it, there are several ways you can contribute to the book. They are listed here in order of most likely to be incorporated first:
- Send me a pull request. By submitting a pull request to me, you make it very easy for me to comment on and/or incorporate your suggested change. As such, I strongly recommend you take this route since it is much more time consuming for me to apply your changes myself (and, therefore, it makes such changes less likely).
- Report the issue as an issue in the issue tracker. This helps me keep track of all the various issues. This approach should be a last resort for changes where the "fix" isn't obvious (and therefore you cannot make the change yourself).
If you send me email suggesting something, I will almost certainly send you back to this section. It is much harder for me to keep track of issues via email. So if you aren't willing to submit a pull request, please take the second option of submitting an issue to the issue tracker.
I welcome translations. My goal is that translations should be distributed under the same terms as the English language of the book. Specifically, this means:
- An HTML version of the book will be hosted at modelica.university and published under a creative commons license.
- ePub and PDF versions of the book should be made available for purchase using a "pay what you can" pricing model.
- Publication of a paper version of the book are a possibility, but I can't commit to physical publishing without further discussion.
In all cases where there is potential revenue, I would be willing to enter into a revenue sharing agreement with the translators.
To learn more about what translations are planned, who to contact about helping with translations or instructions about the translation workflow, please see this dedicated document on translations.
This book is being written using Sphinx. I chose this system after evaluating several others. The main things I liked about Sphinx were:
- The numerous output formats it supports (HTML, ePub and PDF being the important ones).
- The extensibility of the Sphinx system.
- The fact that it supports internationalization.
- The fact that it allows custom templates and CSS to be used.
Sphinx is completely portable so in theory, it should be possible to run Sphinx under nearly any operating system.
Although previous versions required a bunch of tools to build the book, the current version only requires that you have Node and Docker installed. I highly recommend the Docker for Mac and Docker for Windows flavors if you are on macOS or Windows, respectively.
There is now a root level Makefile. You should be able to simply run:
make all
...which should build the book (if I'm forgetting something, send me a pull request
for this README adding any further instructions). The source will be generated in
./text/build/dirhtml.
The Dockerfile used to create the mtiller/book-builder image used to build
the book can be found in the book-builder Repository