This book is a guide to authoring books with R Markdown (Allaire et al.2016) and the R package bookdown (Xie 2016a). It focuses on the features specific to writing books, long-form articles, or reports, such as

• How to typeset figures and tables, and cross-reference them;
• How to generate multiple output formats such as HTML, PDF, and e-books for a single book;
• How to customize the book templates and style different elements in a book;
• The editor support (in particular, the RStudio IDE);
• How to publish a book;
  

It is not a comprehensive introduction to R Markdown or the knitrpackage (Xie 2016b), on top of which bookdown was built. To learn more about R Markdown, please check out the online documentationhttp://rmarkdown.rstudio.com. For knitr, please see Xie (2015b). You do not have to be an expert of the R language (R Core Team 2016) to read this book, but you are expected to have some basic knowledge about R Markdown and knitr. For beginners, you may get started with the cheatsheets at https://www.rstudio.com/resources/cheatsheets/. To be able to customize the book templates and themes, you should be familiar with LaTeX, HTML and CSS.

Allaire, JJ, Joe Cheng, Yihui Xie, Jonathan McPherson, Winston Chang, Jeff Allen, Hadley Wickham, Aron Atkins, and Rob Hyndman. 2016. Rmarkdown: Dynamic Documents for R.http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com.

Xie, Yihui. 2016a. Bookdown: Authoring Books with R Markdown.https://github.com/rstudio/bookdown.

Xie, Yihui. 2016b. Knitr: A General-Purpose Package for Dynamic Report Generation in R. http://yihui.name/knitr/.

Xie, Yihui. 2015b. Dynamic Documents with R and Knitr. 2nd ed. Boca Raton, Florida: Chapman; Hall/CRC. http://yihui.name/knitr/.

R Core Team. 2016. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.https://www.R-project.org/.