Practical NixOS: the Book

I am in the making of a book about NixOS. The key thing I want for this book is to make it approachable by the wider audience. At best, the book would be easily understood by a person who had never had any experience with Linux whatsoever.

There is quite a lot written about nix and NixOS already in the form of documentation and blog posts, but there are actually no books - at all! I think the advantage of having a book is that you can keep up with the complexity being thrown at you in a linear fashion, instead of having to dive into countless rabbit holes without a known roadmap.

There are several topics which I have already drafted and they are going to make it into the book:

"Advanced basics" of the Nix expression language (there is still no good introduction out there, after all these years!)
What do cryptic vars like lib, config, etc mean at the top of a .nix file
Hitchhiker's guide to nix ecosystem
Overview of Nix architecture
Installing NixOS
Using Flakes
Channels vs Overlays vs Overrides
Binary Caches and Remote Builders
Nix Modules and writing your own
Having ecnrypted root volumes
Adding homemanager and using it for VSCode configuration
Using NixOS for development environments
Different development strategies: Rust, TypeScript & Node, Python, Go
- Integrating tooling that you are used to without NixOS: livereload functionality, short compilation times, all the language's packages out there
- Data Science and AI Research environments with Python
Community-developed tools and utilities for NixOS which would make your life simpler
Installing pre-compiled binaries as parts of NixOS configuration
One codebase as single source of truth configuration for different nix-enabled hosts
Rocking Wayland as daily driver
Containerizing apps the NixOS way
Nix-enabled Linux and MacOS with declarative management
Reducing build times and storage usage
Hardware drivers that simply just work, incl. CUDA and GPU Pass-through
Multiple monitor setup
Gaming, of course

This list is not complete, but it gives your the rough understand of what to expect.

Big chunks of the book are dedicated to the topics such as Nix Package Manager architecture and inner workings, and NixOS module system - probably the most mysterious concept among them all.

Below are my blog posts, which are serving as a draft chpaters for the book:

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Practical NixOS: the Book