The Merb Open Source Book

This book is an open source book written for and by the Merb community.

Preview: http://book.merbist.com

To run the book locally, just clone this repo and start the bundled copy of Merb:

    $ ./bin/merb

And open http://localhost:4000/ in your browser

Note that you might have to "redeploy" the native gems if the merb app server doesn't start:

    $ ./bin/thor merb:gem:redeploy

A static HTML and a PDF version will soon be available online.

How to contribute

• Install the github gem from http://github.com/defunkt/github-gem/tree/master.

  $ gem install defunkt-github -s http://gems.github.com
  

• Fork the mattetti/merb-book project by clicking the fork button at http://github.com/mattetti/merb-book/tree/master.

• Clone a copy of the repository to the local machine.

  $ git clone git@github.com:YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME/merb-book.git
  

• Choosing from the branches in Mattetti’s repo (i.e., ‘english’), select the LANGUAGE you're going to contribute to.

• Enter the merb-book directory.

  $ cd merb-book
  

• Checkout the remote branch for the LANGUAGE that you're working on.

  $ gh pull mattetti LANGUAGE
  

• Checkout a local copy of your language branch.

  $ gh checkout -b LANGUAGE
  

• Do a sanity check.

  $ git branch
  * LANGUAGE
  master
  mattetti/LANGUAGE
  

• Set up a remote branch on github for your language.

  $ git push origin LANGUAGE
  

• Modify, fix, and add content in your local LANGUAGE branch.

• Commit your changes into your local Git repository.

  $ git commit -a
  

• Merge in the upstream changes.

  $ gh pull --merge mattetti LANGUAGE
  

• Push your changes back to github.

  $ git push
  

• Send Mattetti a pull request.

For the moment, the content of the book is located inside ./book-content/ and is organized by languages, chapters, and pages.

Chapters and pages must be lowercase and start by a digit followed by a dash and the chapter/page title without spaces or any non ascii characters.

All content files are Markdown files; the merb app uses maruku to render these files. Check the supported syntax or check ./book-content/en/1-introduction/1-ruby.markdown for a good example of how to use images, quotes, and CSS selectors.

The book supports multiple languages. Each language needs to replicate the English folder structure, using the same file names.

If you are copying a page or chapter to your language folder and want to mark a section of your text as requiring translation, just add the to-translate class to the CSS selector of your content, as shown below:

{: .to-translate}

Please follow our editor guidelines, especially:

• use a language branch (so you can see what changed in the English content)
• one sentence per line (so merging is easier)

http://groups.google.com/group/merb-book/web/guidelines

Translation leaders

• Bosnian: http://github.com/sidonath (Damir Zekić)
• Chinese: http://github.com/zhhz (Zhonghai Zuo)
• French: http://github.com/pointcom (Mathieu Fosse)
• German: http://github.com/cypher (Markus Prinz)
• Italian: http://github.com/carlopecchia (Carlo Pecchia)
• Japanese: http://github.com/kwatch (Makoto Kuwata)
• Portuguese: http://github.com/akitaonrails (Fabio Akita)
• Russian: http://github.com/cheba (Alex Mankuta)
• Spanish: http://github.com/joahking (Joaquin Rivera Padron)
• Dutch: http://github.com/pvelder (Peter De Velder)
• Arabic http://github.com/khelll (Khaled AlHabache)
• Indonesian (pending)

Legal

The content of this book is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license

The source code of the application is dual licensed under the MIT and GPL licenses:

• MIT
• GPL