Full Stack Open Book Generator

A Node.js CLI tool to convert the Full Stack Open course into EPUB or PDF formats with support for multiple languages, export types, and content customization.

Ready to grab books

• Download generated Full Stack Open books

🚀 Features

• Multi-language support (English, Finnish, Spanish, Chinese, French, Portuguese)
• Flexible export types (full course, course-only, exercises-only)
• Emoji handling (replace, remove, or keep)
• Progress tracking and error handling

🎯 Quick Start

Complete Pipeline (Recommended)

Note: These commands use default options (English, full course, emoji=replace). For custom options, use the step-by-step approach below.

# Generate full course EPUB (fetches, downloads, and exports)
npm run full-epub

# Generate full course PDF
PDF may be a little buggy, I didn't have time to check and polish PDFs, but they seem to work perfectly fine.
npm run full-pdf

Step-by-Step (Manual)

⚠️ Important: Before running epub or pdf commands, you must first run these commands in order. Use this approach when you need custom options (language, export type, emoji handling):

# 1. Fetch course structure
npm run parts -- --lang=en  # or fi, es, zh, fr, ptbr

# 2. Download lesson content
npm run lessons

# 3. Download images
npm run images

# 4. Clean HTML content
npm run clean

# 5. Generate cover pages
npm run covers

# 6. Export to EPUB or PDF
npm run epub -- --lang=en --type=full --emoji=replace
npm run pdf -- --lang=en --type=full --emoji=replace

# 7. Check the last generated EPUB file using EPUBCheck (optional)
npm run epub:check

Note: EPUBCheck is required for the epub:check command to work.

Note: To generate specific parts only, edit utils/prepareBookContent.js and modify the start and end variables (around line 142) to set the part range (0-indexed).

Note: When generating specific parts, links to other parts may not work properly.

CLI Options

Note: CLI options work with individual commands (epub, pdf, parts) but not with full-epub or full-pdf. Use the step-by-step approach for custom options.

All export commands support optional arguments:

• --lang=en|fi|zh|es|fr|ptbr (default: en) - I didn't test languages other than English properly, but they should work in theory.
• --type=full|course_only|exercises_only (default: full) - When generating types other than full, links to other parts may not work properly.
• --emoji=replace|remove|keep (default: replace) — some e-readers may not support emojis, so the default is to replace them with text.

Examples

# Generate exercises only in Finnish
npm run epub -- --lang=fi --type=exercises_only

# Generate course without exercises in Spanish
npm run pdf -- --lang=es --type=course_only --emoji=remove

# Generate full course in Chinese
npm run epub -- --lang=zh

**Note:** Content is fetched and cleaned in the same directory no matter the language. If you want to generate a specific language, you need to delete the 'output/fetched-data/' directory before running the commands with a different name. Running commands will replace the existing files in that directory with the new ones.

🔧 Configuration

Supported Languages

Languages are configured in config.js:

• en - English (default)
• fi - Finnish (Suomi)
• zh - Chinese (中文)
• es - Spanish (Español)
• fr - French (Français)
• ptbr - Portuguese (Brazil)

Export Types

• full - Complete course content
• course_only - Content without exercises
• exercises_only - Only exercise sections

Emoji Handling

• replace - Convert emojis to text (e.g., ❤️ → :heart:)
• remove - Strip all emojis
• keep - Preserve emojis as-is

🛠️ Tech Stack

This is a Node.js command-line application built with:

• Puppeteer (puppeteer-core + puppeteer) - Web scraping and browser automation
• jsdom - HTML parsing and DOM manipulation
• epub-gen-memory - EPUB file generation
• sanitize-html - HTML sanitization and cleaning
• node-fetch - HTTP requests for downloading content
• chalk - Terminal output styling
• node-emoji - Emoji processing

The tool uses ES modules and requires Node.js 18+ (for node-fetch v3 support).

📁 Project Structure

fso-book/
├── utils/
│   ├── commands/      # Command implementations
│   ├── core/          # Core utilities (AsyncProcessor, ProgressTracker, logger)
│   ├── helpers/       # Helper functions
│   ├── processors/    # HTML processing
│   ├── validators/    # Configuration validation
│   └── prepareBookContent.js
├── assets/            # Cover images, CSS, templates
├── config.js          # Configuration settings
├── index.js           # CLI entry point
└── package.json

📄 License

MIT License

🙏 Acknowledgments

• Full Stack Open course creators
• University of Helsinki