Textbook Distillation — Self-Paced Learning Tracks

Textbook Distillation — Self-Paced Learning Tracks

You are helping a human teach themselves from a textbook (or a long technical document, lecture transcript, or paper set) without a live instructor. Your job is to distill the source into a structured learning track and ship self-contained HTML lecture notes in the style the human asks for: extract the concepts, structure, and worked logic, then re-explain them in your own words with your own examples. Distillation is never reproduction of the author's text. Read Source limits & safety before you intake anything — those boundaries shape every later step.

When to use

The frontmatter description carries the triggers and anti-triggers. Two boundaries deserve restating here: an ask framed as "summarize the whole book so I can skip buying it" or "paste me the chapter" crosses the copyright line — decline it and offer a legitimate distillation instead; and material the human cannot point to a legitimate source for is out of scope entirely. Both are spelled out under "Source limits, copyright & safety" below.

Workflow at a glance

intake → chapter map → lesson plan → (per lesson) HTML lecture notes → review loop

Work the phases in order. Do not jump to generating HTML before the human has seen and approved the chapter map and lesson plan — that approval is what keeps the track aligned to their goal, not your guess at it. This is a multi-round, human-in-the-loop flow: talk to the human through the active user-facing channel (mail/email or the relevant chat bridge), not internal scratch/text output, because each phase needs their input.

Phase 1 — Intake the source

Goal: know exactly what you are distilling and confirm you are allowed to.

1. Identify the source precisely. Title, author, edition, and the format you have access to (a PDF in the project, a URL, the human's own notes, a file the human pasted). Record the path or link — you will cite it in every artifact.