Chapter Dependencies
I’m making slow but steady progress on the Python version of Software Design by Example, and would be grateful for help with something that’s been in the back of my mind for a while. Every one of my books has a glossary and an index. I create both by manually adding markup to the Markdown source files for each chapter, but I believe it should be possible to do the following:
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Identify all uses in all chapters of all the terms in the glossary (matching inflected variants like “refactoring” and “refactored” to “refactor”) so that I can decide which uses should be in the index.
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Identify all uses in all chapters of all glossary terms so that I can make sure each first use is highlighted. (I want tooling to help with this because I sometimes rearrange chapters, and re-checking after each shuffle is tedious and error-prone.)
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Given the sets of terms defined and used in each chapter, construct a graph like the one shown below to show which chapters are prerequisites for which. (The final book will put chapters in a strict order, but their actual relationship is only a partial order.)
What ties these needs together is the notion of dependency management. When I ask a package manager to install library A, part of its job is to figure out that A depends on B and C, both of which depend on D. Similarly, when my code imports B, my language’s runtime is responsible for loading D as well. In theory, dynamic imports with constructed names make this impossible to do 100% of the time, but in practice the problem is mostly solvable.
I’d like to do the same for lessons. I’d like to be able to point a tool at a set of lessons and have it tell me what ideas are explained in each and which lessons depend on ideas that are explained elsewhere so that I can build a curriculum, check for circularity, and so on. I think this ought to be possible using tools like NLTK and spaCy, but I don’t know enough about natural language processing to accomplish anything useful in the 3–4 hours I’ve budgeted for this. (A big part of getting a book out the door is putting strict limits on the time you spend shaving yaks.) If you can help, or if you have a couple of scripts I could tinker with, please reach out.