I'd recommend educative platform for your book (as a course).

I wrote my own book about Ruby for beginners https://leanpub.com/rubyisforfun, and converted it to a course, which is quite fun https://www.educative.io/courses/handbook-ruby-developers

Released 1-2 weeks ago, but it looks to me like a promising future - the new format of books that are more interactive. Website allows to run snippets, do interactive assessments, and so on.

The reading and learning is much more convenient.

Thanks for the tip. I am thinking about a course, but spent so much time on the book I unsure if I could make it in a reasonable time :)

Not interested in this book, but maybe you find my opinion of any value:

Your website comes off as hustle to get money without content:

* The first section where you describe your product, you avoid all that the product is, making me think you don't actually have content which you want to show off(the book image is digital with no mention of it being an ebook, the description is about me and tehnologies, no preview, no list of concrete things I learn)

* In the next section you continue marketing a dream instead of the actual content, then you sell reviews, a story and others' opinion. Again, I conclude that you don't want me to form my own opinion of potentially bad content.

* "What I'll get" is meta content, things I should see after being sold the content. At that point I clicked off the website thinking it's a scam.

Before commenting this I went one more time to make sure I didn't miss anything and discovered that you actually do have chapters content and preview, just past the point where I clicked off.

I happened to have a quite different view.

It was clear to me the content I was supposed to get.

The only reason I didn't purchase is because the value proposition "save time managing your own side-project/startup deployment" is not smart, to me at least.

I decided to pay and outsource most of these things away in order to focus on differentiating software, marketing/sales and peace of mind.

Edit: I also think the "start a career in SRE" is quite a long stretch.

Thanks for your feedback.

> the value proposition "save time managing your own side-project/startup deployment" is not smart

I would say it's not right for all. But it's 100% true (from my readers) that people learn self-hosting to cut costs. That part of the page targets these people.

> I decided to pay and outsource most of these things away in order to focus on differentiating software, marketing/sales and peace of mind

I want to say that the saving angle is only one of the reasons pointed out. If you want to know how things work and don't care about saving, it's still worth to learn it.

I think you are not the target audience, though, since you want to focus on other aspects of the business which you probably enjoy more. :)

> I also think the "start a career in SRE" is quite a long stretch

The book shows you lot of Linux content you can find in RHCSA and RHCE exams. If you would really learn what's in it, you can be hired on spot for a junior role.

Those are fair points, I agree this is subjective. That's why I said "to me at least".

I've done this kind of work in the past and would certainly enjoy learning more. Your book was inviting. I just won't have the time at this moment. Need to focus elsewhere, as I said.

When thinking about business, the initial scale is quite small and managed services are cheap (and a variable cost) compared to the time I'd spend on self-managed (high upfront, fixed cost).

Thanks a lot for your feedback. Happy you found the time to write it.

I agree I should clarify it's an ebook sooner in text. And I want to redo the chapters. But I get a lot of conflicting feedback so hard to know what's right.

The page has a good conversion, though. So something is working.

Based on the table of contents and the preview pages it looks like it has some pretty good content. Made me think of "the missing manual" book series.

I just don't think small startups or side-projects should spend so much time getting all the configuration and moving parts right compared to just Docker+Terraform+(IaaS of choice). Then if one is on a tight budget, then just run Docker Compose on a single host, or run on a computer at home being proxied by Cloudflare free account. If able to spend more, then use the IaaS managed services like for containers and databases.

I guess I feel that setting people up to deploy with bespoke Bash scripts is borderline irresponsible since they won't be easily, or automatically, updated in case there are any other issues, unlike something like Terraform. I can't tell that easily however because there is no architectural diagram to help understand what the book leads up to as how one should deploy things.

However it seems more like it would be a better guide as "Linux Servers from Scratch"? That would be something which would be good reading for someone new to tech. Before moving onto higher abstractions. Or being used as the from scratch guide on how to customize container images by more experienced programmers, but those missing the Linux admin fundamentals.

I really believe that what I put into the book should be a knowledge a person deploying production application should have.

> I just don't think small startups or side-projects should spend so much time getting all the configuration and moving parts right compared to just Docker+Terraform+(IaaS of choice).

It's the opposite actually! I show you how to avoid a lot of indirection and have a deploy script in 200 lines of Bash that you understand in an afternoon.

If you choose to use Docker, I have a full chapter of building containers, doing Docker networking, running containers with the Docker engine or with Podman like any other systemd service.

You can then write a small Bash script to install Docker and deploy your container or write an abstraction in a tool like Ansible. That's your choice and I think I present good arguments for both.

> deploy with bespoke Bash scripts is borderline irresponsible

Only like 5% of the book spends time talking about how to glue everything with Bash. Most is networking, permissions, configuration. The idea is to see how things are done with the most basic building block which is a shell.

The thing is shell code is how you interact with your operating system unless you are using C API. It's what most deployment tools use under the hood, not to mention that many tools are basically Bash (ruby-install, chruby) or based around executing it (Dockerfile).

> However it seems more like it would be a better guide as "Linux Servers from Scratch"?

I already renamed the book twice :). Not anymore, please ;). Most people actually told me they don't care for the name at all. Yes, there is a lot of Linux, but I named it after the intent. The intent is to deploy at the end. The fact that most of the deployment is configuration is implementation detail.

Fair enough. :-) Like I said, my impression is that the content seems good! What I can't tell, without reading it, is what the end state of the dev/ops architecture would be along with its maintenance requirements, to understand if it would be a good complete resource to refer to beginners in tech I can't assist myself.

The main idea is building a single server deployment in a secure and maintainable way... and then possibly taking it to 5-10 servers at which point the Bash-only approach is less than ideal (but possible). Then you can pick a better tool of your choice (Ansible, Docker Swarm), but learning it is outside the scope of the book.

The demonstrations are made alongside the indie hackers/early-stage startup mindset. Run a single server, or possibly single server with a dedicated database.

> I just don't think small startups or side-projects should spend so much time getting all the configuration and moving parts right compared to just Docker+Terraform+(IaaS of choice).

Hype aside, I'd add serverless. One can build a lot of stuff with very little hassle on top of AWS Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB and S3.

> Took me more than 3 years to write (1+ year of fulltime billable time)

It shows - very polished. Have you described your process for writing the book anywhere? Given the quality of the landing page and samples, I'd also be interested in that.