Write books and long-form reports with <em class="emphasis">bookdown</em>

Section 16.9 Write books and long-form reports with bookdown

The bookdown package [6] is designed for creating long-form documents that are composed of multiple R Markdown documents. For example, if you want to write a book, you can write each chapter in its own Rmd file, and use bookdown to compile these Rmd files into a book.

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For RStudio users, the easiest way to get started is to create a bookdown project with the IDE by selecting File -> New Project -> New Directory -> Book Project using bookdown, as you can see from Figure 16.9.1.

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If you do not use RStudio or if you prefer to work from the console, you may produce the same result by calling the function bookdown:::bookdown_skeleton('your-book-dir').

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Figure 16.9.1. Create a bookdown project in RStudio.
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To demonstrate the usage, we provide a minimal example consisting of three files within the same directory:

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directory
  |- index.Rmd
  |- 01-intro.Rmd
  |- 02-analysis.Rmd

Below we show the content of each file and explain their roles.

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index.Rmd:
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```
---
title: "A Minimal bookdown Project"
site: bookdown::bookdown_site
output: bookdown::gitbook
---

# Preface {-}

Some content
```
The first file is typically called index.Rmd. It should be the only Rmd file in which you provide the YAML frontmatter. It should also include a special YAML field site: bookdown::bookdown_site, so that rmarkdown knows to use bookdown to build all Rmd files, instead of rendering a single Rmd file. You can use any bookdown output formats, such as bookdown::gitbook, bookdown::pdf_book, bookdown::word_document2, and bookdown::epub_book.
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01-intro.Rmd:
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```
# Chapter 1

This is chapter 1.
```
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02-analysis.Rmd:
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```
# Chapter 2

This is chapter 2.
```
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To render these Rmd files, you should call bookdown::render_book('index.Rmd') instead of rmarkdown::render(). Under the hood, bookdown merges all Rmd files into a single Rmd by default and compiles it. Files are merged in alphabetical order. That is why we added numeric prefixes to filenames in the above example.

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There are a lot of settings that you can customize for a bookdown project. For a more comprehensive overview of bookdown, you may see Chapter 18 of the rmarkdown book [53]. For the full documentation, see the bookdown book [7].

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