To get the most out of this book
Start by reading the first section, which describes the basic concepts and common features for all diagram types. After that, you can read the diagram-specific chapters in any order.
For most of the examples in the book, you only need an editor with support for Mermaid. A good editor that is easy to access is Mermaid Live Editor, which can be found online (https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid-live-editor/) and only requires your browser to run.
Apart from that, some sections may require a rudimentary knowledge of HTML, such as what an element is and what CSS is.
In order to run the examples on setting up documentation systems, you will need a JavaScript interpreter called Node.js, which runs from the command line. It needs to be installed on your machine. If you do not already have Node.js installed, you can download it from https://nodejs.org/en/, which contains the installation options and appropriate instructions.
If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code via the GitHub repository (link available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.
If you find errors in the Mermaid library, please submit an issue to the Mermaid GitHub repository at https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid.
