News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Things I learned writing my first technical book by tibbar on Sunday December 26, 2021 @04:31AM (#29690946)
> Mind maps are a great visualization tool. Use them smartly

I’m curious about this, since my experience with mind maps is that they rapidly grow into giant overly-connected graphs that are very difficult to translate to the sort of linear structure a book or blog post needs. What is OP’s workflow for connecting the two?

Re:Things I learned writing my first technical book by csbartus on Sunday December 26, 2021 @04:39AM (#29690969)
I ran in the same issue. And I've created Coco - a Content-as-Code framework to split large graphs / mind maps into small, understandable chunks.

You can take a look at how Coco works here: http://metamn.io/react/on-design-systems-3/ (All figures except the first were made with Coco)

Re:Things I learned writing my first technical book by klavik on Sunday December 26, 2021 @10:23AM (#29693064)
Check out OrgPad if you want to see an evolution of mind maps which is actually useful for serious work. For example this single diagram explains why Clojure is great: https://orgpad.com/s/oirCrD.
Re:Things I learned writing my first technical book by danbst on Sunday December 26, 2021 @11:47AM (#29693945)
Partly related, the No Bullshit Guide to Linear Algebra has a concept map as a first page, which looks really stunning. Author definitely had spent time mindmapping stuff before writing.

https://minireference.com/miniref/lib/tpl/miniref/dist/image...

Re:Things I learned writing my first technical book by viebel on Sunday December 26, 2021 @08:49AM (#29692329)
Author here: In my book, I used mind maps to let the readers visualize a high level summary of a chapter. Here is an example of such a mind map: https://twitter.com/viebel/status/1469187345580793860
Re:Things I learned writing my first technical book by throw349v on Sunday December 26, 2021 @12:46PM (#29694499)
What software did you use to create the mindmap?
Re:Things I learned writing my first technical book by viebel on Sunday December 26, 2021 @10:32PM (#29698823)
Lucidchart
Re:Things I learned writing my first technical book by asplake on Sunday December 26, 2021 @04:46AM (#29690995)
Yep. Half the fun/challenge of writing a book (I’m on my fourth) is finding the right linear sequence.
Re:Things I learned writing my first technical book by viebel on Sunday December 26, 2021 @08:50AM (#29692334)
Author here: More challenge than fun!