bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown

by Yihui Xie (Author)
Generate printer-ready books and ebooks from R Markdown documents
A markup language easier to learn than LaTeX, and to write elements such as section headers, lists, quotes, figures, tables, and citations

Summary
bookdown: 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 publications: 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.

Author(s) Bio
Yihui Xie is a software engineer at RStudio. He is the author of several R packages, and interested in statistical computing, data visualization, and web technologies. He founded the largest online community for statistics "Capital of Statistics" in China in 2006. After publishing a few journal papers, a PhD thesis, and the book Dynamic Documents with R and knitr, the frustration with LaTeX eventually led to the creation of bookdown.