Styleguide and Contributing • A Beginner’s Guide to Finding User Needs

You can contribute in the following ways:

Write a mail to dittrich.c.jan AT gmail DOT com and write your suggestions, mistakes found etc.
If you have a github account: File an issue on github
If you have a github account: Submit a pull request to the repo (just submit for correcting spelling, grammar, for larger content changes it makes sense to talk about them before)

Corrections in spelling mistakes, more terse sentences etc. are usually added and deployed quickly
Structural changes or added/changed content can take a bit of time. Usually, I work on them in a separate version a bit, which can also be shared for collaboration, called a git branch

Personal: “I” when talking about experiences and suggestions, “you” to address the reader.
Simple style: Mostly active forms, frequent words favored over unusual terms (see Orwell’s Six Rules of writing )

The intro “What this chapter is about” should use gerunds and point to results, but not how to do things
The summary at the end of the chapter does not gerund and tells the solutions

(This follows the way Manning Pub structures this)

List items do not need to end with a full stop
Image captions should end with a full stop
If quotation marks are around a word or phrase, the full stop is placed outside the quotations marks.

Do not use abbreviations like e.g. or etc., write them fully
Write “preceeding” and “following” not “above” and “below” (different formats use different spaces, e.g. some eBook readers suggest a text going from left to right while browsers will render the text on a looooog page from top to bottom)

Name: Chapternumber_chaptername_Imagename. If image used twice, reuse the first, do not copy the image.
Markdown syntax: ![image caption](images/01_chaptername_imagename){#imageId alt="image description"}

This is a bit programmer-ish:

The tool used for converting the files into the website and other formats is pandoc.
If you do changes, commit the markdown (and other relevant files like possible images), but not the build index.html.
On *nix systems, you can use make html to create the website, make epub to create an epub, make odt to create a libreoffice file, which can be useful for working in a word processor or for using google docs or the like for collaboration.
The website version is served via github pages. The master branch is directly served online (no gh-pages branch)