Introduction

R Markdown is a flavor of Markdown, a markup language. Markdown can be converted to other formats like HTML, but is as easy to use as normal text. R Markdown allows one to combine normal R code with text to produce a wide variety of document formats. This allows for a continuous transition from initial data import and processing to a finished product, whether journal article, slide presentation, or even a website.

Goals

The goal is for you to be able to get quickly started with your own document, and understand the possibilities available to you. You will get a feel for the basic mechanics at play, as well as have ideas on how to customize the result to your own tastes. You should also understand it well enough to use it for your next paper/project/whatever. This is only meant as an introduction. If you really want to dive in, see the definitive source here. This document is a compliment to the R programming notes I have here. The two combined will go a long way toward filling in many gaps for those who have mostly just been trained to use R for statistical analysis.

Prerequisites

The only prerequisite is a basic understanding of R. Much of the R code in the document won’t be dwelt upon or really explained, as what the code does won’t matter in many contexts. This is definitely not a place where you will learn how to program in R or do statistics with it.

Note the following color coding used in this document:

• emphasis
• package
• function
• object/class
• link

Note

This document is created with R Markdown via the bookdown package.