How do you write a book?
wigglywonk: Just start writing, using whatever works best for you.  I've been using TextEdit on the mac a lot lately for my writing, but anything's good.If you're writing for a publisher, then they're going to give you a template that's probably for Word, and you don't have to worry about complicated document struturing stuff -- they'll help with the referencing, etc.If you're doing it all yourself, then a document description system such as LaTeX might be the way to go.  If I was writing a technical book that i knew had little chance of being published, I'd probably use that.