Publishing to BookDown

The bookdown package, written by Yihui Xie, is built on top of R Markdown and the knitr package. Use it to publish a book or long manuscript where each chapter is a separate file. There are instructions for how to author a book in his bookdown book (Xie 2019). The main advantage of bookdown over R Markdown is that you can produce multi-page HTML output with numbered headers, equations, figures, etc., just like in a book. I’m using bookdown to create a compendium of all my data science notes.

The first step to using bookdown is installing the **bookdown* package with install.packages("bookdown").

Next, create an account at bookdown.org, and connect the account to RStudio. Follow the instructions at https://bookdown.org/home/about/.

Finally, create a project in R Studio by creating a new project of type Book Project using Bookdown.

After creating all of your Markdown pages, knit the book or click the Build Book button in the Build panel.

References

Xie, Yihui. 2019. Bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown. 1st ed. Boca Raton, Florida: Chapman; Hall/CRC. https://bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown/.