"How to learn Emacs" http://david.rothlis.net/emacs/howtolearn.html is a guide aimed at computer programmers who want to master the GNU Emacs text editor.

Generating HTML from the source HAML files

The document source is in Haml + Markdown format: Haml for HTML block structure, and Markdown for paragraphs and formatting.

Haml uses significant indentation:

HAML                HTML
#about              <div id='about'>
  *Hello* there       *Hello* there
                    </div>

See http://haml-lang.com for details.

I use a custom fork† of Haml that automatically formats plain-text content through Markdown‡, so the above Haml example actually converts to:

<div id='about'>
  <p>
    <em>Hello</em> there
  </p>
</div>

† https://github.com/drothlis/haml/wiki
‡ http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax

To install all the necessary tools: (on a Unixy system: Linux, OS X, etc.)

1. Install ruby and rubygems (the ruby package manager) with your system's package manager (macports or homebrew on OS X, apt-get or yum on some Linux distributions, etc.). You may already have these installed (try ruby and gem at the terminal). On some systems the rubygems package is called rb-rubygems.

2. Use gem to install the rdiscount package (a Markdown implementation):
   gem install rdiscount

3. Clone this repository:
   git clone git://github.com/drothlis/how-to-learn-emacs.git

4. Fetch the haml submodule of this repository:
   cd how-to-learn-emacs
git submodule init
git submodule update

5. Build the HTML from the Haml sources:
   make

Why are the generated HTML files tracked in the git repository?

So that I can easily see the effects of changes to the scripts that generate the HTML.