Open-Source ‘Book-to-Skill’ Turns Technical Books into Claude Code Queries
This article introduces the open‑source “book-to-skill” tool that compiles technical books into a Claude Code skill, enabling terminal queries that return answers from the actual book content while keeping token usage low and avoiding AI hallucinations.
Problem
Feeding an entire technical book—often hundreds of thousands of tokens—into Claude Code is costly and spreads the model’s attention, which leads to hallucinated answers.
Solution – book-to-skill
book-to-skill is an open‑source MIT‑licensed tool that compiles a technical book into a Claude Code skill. It splits the source by chapter, extracts the book’s framework, core principles and knowledge structure, and stores the fragments so that only the needed parts are loaded at query time, keeping token consumption bounded.
Supported formats
EPUB
DOCX
Markdown (fastest to process)
MOBI
Installation
git clone https://github.com/virgiliojr94/book-to-skill.git ~/.claude/skills/book-to-skillIngestion
/book-to-skill ~/your-book.pdfQuerying
After ingestion, invoke the skill from the terminal with the syntax /book-name your-question. Claude Code retrieves the relevant fragment from the original content and answers without fabricating text.
Project size
The repository consists of two source files (~1,300 lines of code) and has earned over 5,000 GitHub stars.
Repository
https://github.com/virgiliojr94/book-to-skill
Signed-in readers can open the original source through BestHub's protected redirect.
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Java backend, microservices, distributed systems, containerized programming, and more.
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