Preface

My journey to learn Nix was only made possible by my extreme desire to master it. The path was anything but easy and predictable. And it is still a considerable hurdle for many who try to learn Nix.

The goal of this book is to provide newcomers with a more approachable document than the nix-pills series. Although nix-pills is a very good resource with many years of refinement, it is extensive and hard to follow without some prior knowledge of Nix. Pills attempts to teach deep understanding of Nix + Nixpkgs while this book attempts to teach relevance: the 20% of Nix you will need 80% of the time. This book hopes to provide a more recent account of Nix with more of a focus on giving the user intuition around what Nix is doing rather than clarity.

The motivation for writing this is to provide a “Nix equivalent of the rust-lang book”: one resource that can be read end-to-end in an afternoon that is able to equip the reader with the knowledge necessary to thrive in the Nix ecosystem. The goal is not to replace any existing Nix guides or documentation, but rather provide a good starting place for new users.