Writing a book using rmarkdown & bookdown

[prof-anderson]

It is way too rough to distribute but I've been hacking away on a book to support my team, "The Extreme Technology Analytics Research Group". The research group's web site is available from www.tfdea.com.

The topic of the book covers how to do quantitative benchmarking using R. Meant for people relatively new to R up to experts that are unfamiliar with benchmarking. Along the way it covers how to do optimization as well.

The book is currently 9 chapters and about 80 pages. A few chapters are merely stubs though for more content. I've been pretty pleased with putting in LaTeX equations in rmarkdown and how well bookdown pulls it all together. It has been an interesting learning experience dealing with problems along the way.

Still wrestling with a lot of issues. Interested in talking with people that are interested in getting involved in the book, applications, or other issues.

[sckott]

thanks for the issue @prof-anderson - good discussion topic if you'll be coming

[znmeb]

I've also got a bookdown book in progress. I haven't had any issues with the technology - it's coming up with content and getting feedback on it that's holding me back more than anything else.

On LaTeX, I'll give you the same piece of advice I give everyone: just bite the bullet and install all of the LaTeX distribution up front. It's about 4 GB of disk space and takes quite a bit of time to download and install, but hunting down missing packages / fonts / styles / executables is a waste of time when you're authoring.