An interactive index

Paper books often have an index. The index is a list, near the end of the book, where indexed words are given, often in alphabetical order, and for each indexed word, page numbers where the indexed word can be found are given.

In an electronic book on the web, an alternative is to create an interactive index. This can be done using a search box where the reader can type a word, and if the word is in the index, one or more links to where the word can be found are displayed.

In a Book with Views, one could go a step further, and let the indexed words be view-specific. This can be tried out, in the book Into Programming, for example by first searching for the word computer, which is in all views, and then searching for compiler and interpreter, which are not available in all views.

The search works in any page of the book.

There is also a traditional index, at the Index page, which is one of the About pages.

Keeping track of concepts

In a textbook kind of book, new concepts are introduced to the reader. In a book with hyperlinks, such as an e-book or a book on the web, it is possible to link the introduction of a concept to a table with all concepts in the book, bundled together with explanations, and perhaps also with links to be used for further reading.

In a Book with Views, this can be extended to a per-view handling of the concepts. You can see an example of this, in the introduction of the concepts variable and value in the beginning of the chapter called Names and values in the book Into Programming.

The collection of concepts can also be reached via the book’s About page.

View-specific URL references

When describing how to compile and run a program, you may want to refer to tools suitable for this task. These tools are often language-specific, like if you have a C-compiler it is good for precisely that task – compiling C-programs.

In a programming book with views, where each view represent a specific programming language, different tool references can be made for the different views. You can see an example of this in the Section How to make it run (use the menu on the left to change view), in the book Into Programming.

You can also see how the different URLs pointing to the different tools show up on the About page for URLs.