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I agree that writing large volumes of text in LaTeX is cumbersome, and the same goes for text that includes many code samples. \begin{verbatim}...\end{verbatim}

I agree that writing large volumes of text in LaTeX is cumbersome, and the same goes for text that includes many code samples. \begin{verbatim}...\end{verbatim} is just too verbose, and \verb|...| for inline code is also too verbose to my taste. So right now I'm writing my book in Markdown, and put it on leanpub for now (https://leanpub.com/deploy https://leanpub.com/deploy). For print, I'll either figure out a way to get a PDF formatted as I want it from leanpub, or use pandoc to create the markdown to LaTeX, and then write a custom template with all the customization. But this is something that I won't worry too much about until the manuscript is really finished.

tjl 10y ago
For code samples I prefer to have them in separate files and include them so it's just one command that imports them and formats them. I wrote both my Master's and Ph.D. theses in LaTeX and found it much better than the alternatives. With Markdown I'd be resorting to falling back on LaTeX anyway and many of the additional Markdown features weren't available when I wrote them. I had a predefined document class for my Master's but the university changed the guidelines by the time of my Ph.D. so I used the Memoir document class and that had a lot of flexibility and I didn't have to include many other packages to format things. I basically set up the format once at the beginning, checked against the guidelines once at the end and that was it.