Chapter 1 Welcome

hi

It’s possible to create beautiful books for free using RStudio’s R Markdown and Yihui Xie’s bookdown and hosting them on Github. This is pretty new and incredibly cool. It is a really powerful way to communicate science using the same reproducible workflow you use for your analyses and collaborations.

This tutorial borrows heavily from a lot of great tutorials and resources you should check out too – there are links throughout. It also parallels a previous tutorial Making free websites with RStudio’s R Markdown.

The best way to learn is to follow along with your own laptop, but all are welcome. We’ll spend half the time with the tutorial and half the time for you to work on your own website and get help. If you bring your laptop please do this beforehand:

  1. install RStudio
  2. create a GitHub account (advice)
  3. set up your computer to talk to GitHub

Examples:

We have been using bookdown for the Ocean Health Index: ohi-science.org/data-science-training and Openscapes: openscapes.org/series.
And R Markdown is much more than books and websites – here’s a one-minute video about R Markdown to get you excited.

1.1 Learn all about Bookdown

The best way to learn more about bookdown is from Yihui Xie himself. You can read his book bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown or watch his webinar introducing bookdown.