Project-based learning by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
There is just one key gotcha: the project has to be useful.
Chinese garden by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Figure 1.
The Humble Administrator's Garden in Suzhou
. Source.
Figure 2.
Round door at the Lingering Garden in Suzhou
. Source.
KaTeX by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Default mathematics typesetting used in OurBigBook Markup.
Key issues:
CommonMark by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
CommonMark is a good project. But its initial release method was not very nice, they first developed everything behind closed doors with the big adopters like GitHub and Stack Overflow, and only later released the thing read, thus wasting the time of people who were working on alternative in the meanwhile, e.g. github.com/karlcow/markdown-testsuite which Ciro contributed to: Ciro Santilli's minor projects.
Ciro Santilli's joke version of the Chinese Four Treasures of the Study!
  • web browser
  • Text editor
  • terminal. Though to be honest, circa 2022, Ciro learned of the ctrl + click to open file (including with file.c:123 line syntax) ability of Visual Studio Code (likely present in other IDEs), and he was starting considering dumping the terminal altogether if some implementation gets it really really right. The main thing is that it can't be a tinny little bar at the bottom, it has to be full window and super easily toggleable!
In the past, Ciro used to use file managers, which would be the fourth tresure. But he stopped doing so for years due to his cd alias... so it became three. He actually had exactly three windows open when he was checking if there was anything else he could not open hand of.
Figure 1.
The three Treasures of the Programmer
. Featuring: Gvim, tmux running in GNOME terminal, and Chromium browser on Ubuntu 22.04. The minimized windows are for demonstration purposes, Cirism mandates that all windows shall be maximized at all times. Splits withing a single program are permitted however.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact