virgiliojr94/book-to-skill

📚 book-to-skill

Turn any technical book (PDF or EPUB) into a Claude Code skill — ready to study, reference, and use while you work.

Why · What it generates · Usage · Requirements · How it works · FAQ · Install

🤔 Why

You buy a great technical book. You read it once. Three months later you can't remember chapter 7 existed.

The usual workarounds don't help:

• 📄 "Let me just search the PDF" → you get a list of pages, not answers
• 🧠 "I'll ask Claude about this book" → it either hallucinates or says it doesn't have the content
• 📝 "I'll take notes as I read" → you end up with a 200-line doc you never open again

book-to-skill solves this by turning the book into a structured skill Claude loads on demand.

Once installed, you just type /your-book-slug replication and Claude reads the right chapter and answers from the actual content. No hallucination. No digging through PDFs. The book becomes part of your workflow.

📦 What it generates

Running /book-to-skill your-book.pdf (or .epub) creates a full skill at ~/.claude/skills//:

| File | Purpose | Size | |------|---------|------| | SKILL.md | Core mental models + chapter index | ~4,000 tokens | | chapters/ch01-*.md … | One file per chapter, loaded on-demand | ~1,000 tokens each | | glossary.md | Every key term, alphabetically sorted with chapter refs | ~1,500 tokens | | patterns.md | All techniques, algorithms, and design patterns | ~2,000 tokens | | cheatsheet.md | Decision tables and quick-reference rules | ~1,000 tokens |

Chapter files are loaded on-demand — they don't count against the skill budget until you ask about that topic.

🚀 Usage

/book-to-skill  [skill-name-slug]

Examples:

# PDF — derive skill name from filename
/book-to-skill ~/Downloads/designing-data-intensive-applications.pdf

# EPUB — specify a custom slug
/book-to-skill ~/books/clean-code.epub clean-code

# Full path with explicit name
/book-to-skill /tmp/ddd-evans.pdf domain-driven-design

After the skill is created, use it like any other Claude Code skill:

/designing-data-intensive-apps                  # load core mental models
/designing-data-intensive-apps replication      # find and explain a topic
/designing-data-intensive-apps ch05             # dive into chapter 5
/designing-data-intensive-apps "what chapters do you have?"

🔧 Requirements

At least one extraction tool must be installed.

For PDF — choose by book type:

| Book type | Tool | Install | Speed | |-----------|------|---------|-------| | Text-heavy (prose, few tables) | pdftotext (poppler) | sudo apt install poppler-utils | ⚡ instant | | Text-heavy fallback | PyPDF2 | pip3 install PyPDF2 | ⚡ instant | | Text-heavy fallback | pdfminer.six | pip3 install pdfminer.six | ⚡ instant | | Technical (code, tables, formulas) | docling | pip3 install docling | ~1.5s/page |

Before extraction begins, the skill asks you whether th