bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown

The R Series

by Yihui Xie

Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown presents a much easier way to write books and technical publications than traditional tools such as LaTeX and Word. The bookdown package inherits the simplicity of syntax and flexibility for data analysis from R Markdown, and extends R Markdown for technical writing, so that you can make better use of document elements such as figures, tables, equations, theorems, citations, and references. Similar to LaTeX, you can number and cross-reference these elements with bookdown . Your document can even include live examples so readers can interact with them while reading the book. The book can be rendered to multiple output formats, including LaTeX/PDF, HTML, EPUB, and Word, thus making it easy to put your documents online. The style and theme of these output formats can be customized.
We used books and R primarily for examples in this book, but bookdown is not only for books or R. Most features introduced in this book also apply to other types of journal papers, reports, dissertations, course handouts, study notes, and even novels. You do not have to use R, either. Other choices of computing languages include Python, C, C++, SQL, Bash, Stan, JavaScript, and so on, although R is best supported. You can also leave out computing, for example, to write a fiction. This book itself is an example of publishing with bookdown and R Markdown, and its source is fully available on GitHub.

Genres: Programming, Technical, Writing

138 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 12, 2016

Reviews

[Clifton Franklund · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a relatively short, but very informative book on using the bookdown package in R. I plan to use this package to produce reproducible assessment reports for General Education. I may also use it to produce more complicated manuscripts. The basics are well-covered. I will need more instruction (and specific examples) in order to really learn the more advanced publication options. Fortunately, I'm pretty comfortable in HTML and LaTeX. I could have read this for free online. However, I wanted to provide some financially support to Dr. Xie's important work by getting a print copy (and I can never have enough books dealing with R).

[Akbar Ato · Rating 5 out of 5]

This books is short and handy.

For me, this book was a gem. I am so tired of writing in LaTeX and Word. With R Markdown, or any markdown file, I can just focus on writing part.

It gives practical ways of converting your written text in md files into readable formats, namely PDF, HTML, Word, and more.

If you’re writing books, book chapters, dissertations/theses, journal articles, go with bookdown package in R programming language.

[Ryan McShane · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is starting point for writing a book with R Markdown. However, many options are left to the user (for better and worse).

Time will tell whether this was useful for me!

[Yen-Chung Chen · Rating 5 out of 5]

In-depth and easy to follow documentation for the bookdown package.