Writing PHP Books With Docbook

Last November, I wrote an article for ONLamp.Com called Writing “Learning PHP 5” about the tools and PHP scripts I used to manage the Docbook XML source of my book Learning PHP 5.



Sebastian Bergmann then wrote about how he used PHP and DocBook for his book Professionelle Softwareentwicklung mit PHP 5.



There are plenty of similarities between what Sebastian and I did, but he has a few nice touches that I will adopt for next DocBook project, such as using XIncludes for code examples (makes building an archive of all the examples in the book a snap) and a snazzy build script that does things like syntax highlighting.



I use Learning PHP 5 as a textbook for some PHP classes and training sessions, so being able to move back and forth between DocBook and the XML that Pres2 understands is helpful. (I’m actually using a modified, PHP 5-only version of Pres2 (that I’ve named “Pres5”) for the presentations, which I’ll package up and release one day when (familiar refrain ahead) I make the code less embarassing.)

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