Table of Contents
All the software that I have used in the creation of this book have been free and open source software. In the first draft, I had used Red Hat 9.0 Linux as my setup and for this fifth draft, I have used Fedora Core 1 Linux as the foundation of my Linux box setup.
Initially, I used KWord to create this book (as explained in the History Lesson in the preface). Later, I switched to DocBook XML using Kate but I found it too tedious. So, I switched to OpenOffice which was just excellent with the level of control on the formatting as well as the PDF generation, but it produced very sloppy HTML from the document. Finally, I discovered XEmacs and I rewrote this book from scratch in DocBook XML (again). This book would not have been possible if it wasn't for XEmacs (and XMMS, of course).
The standard XSL stylesheets that come with the Fedora Core 1 Linux distribution were used. The standard default fonts were used as well. However, I have written a CSS document to give color and style to the pages. I have also written a crude lexical analyzer (in Python of course!) which automatically provides syntax highlighting to all the programs listed in this book (this applies to the HTML form of the book only).