spacekookie/learning-nix

#+Title: NixOS training material
#+Author: Katharina Fey
#+SETUPFILE: html.setup

Welcome to my Nix training material repository!

I created this material for the purpose of having a set of slides,
code snippets, example projects, and advanced visualisations to teach
the /Nix expression language/ and ecosystem to developers of varying
backgrounds.

(Note that this material was really designed with a teacher in mind.
As such, some slides are very sparse and not self-explanatory. I'm
working on expanding speaker notes to make the course material easier
to read on your own.)

Is your company looking for on-site or remote training? [[mailto:kookie@spacekookie.de][Contact me]]
for details and booking!

** Course outline

This course is meant to be taught in 5 half-day sessions. It ranges
from beginner subjects all the way to advanced usage of the module
system, cross-compilation, and other special niches.

• [[file:courses/day-01-introduction/README.org][Day 1: Introduction]] :: A short introduction and elevator-pitch of
  what Nix(OS) can do for you. This course covers some theoretical
  background on how Nix does what it does, priming you to think like
  Nix, and some exercises to get practise in writing Nix code.

• [[file:courses/day-02-builders/README.org][Day 2: Builders]] :: Get started writing Nix packages with so called
  /stand-alone builders/. This course covers some of the packaging
  details, such as understanding dependencies and overriding build
  mechanisms.

• [[file:courses/day-03-advanced/README.org][Day 3: Advanced Concepts]] :: This course covers an introduction into
  /nixpkgs/, a repository set of over 80,000 packages and many
  different Nix utilities for creating new packages and modules.
  Furthermore this course touches on /flakes/ and more advanced
  concepts such as /cross compilation/.

• [[file:courses/day-05-modules/README.org][Day 4: Module system]] :: Nix is a powerful configuration language.
  If you run NixOS on your system, you may have already used modules!
  This course demystifies their functionality and provides a set of
  examples on how to build your own module abstractions.

** Building these slides

The slides are written in [[https://org-mode.org][org-mode]], a plain-text markup language. As
such it is very easy to read and adapt in any text editor. GitHub and
GitLab are able to render the documents, but not as slide decks.

A hosted version of this course is available at [[https://learn.spacekookie.de/nix/][learn.spacekookie.de]]!

If you want to build the slides yourself, you will need org-mode and
org-reveal installed. You can find a utility function for
generating the output in [[./ci/export-course.el][ci/export-course.el]]. (Load the function with
=M-x eval-buffer=)

** Sponsors

This course has been sponsored by various companies that have paid for
training and the creation of new material in the past.

(todo: insert logos)

** License

This material is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) or later.

This license allows you to include the material in your own work, as
long as that work is also shared under the same license (CC-BY-SA 4.0
or later). Importantly your work must attribute any original
authors of work that you have used.

This text is not legal advice! Check with a lawyer in your
respective jurisdiction what your rights and obligations under this
license are.