This book is mainly about the R package knitr, which is on CRAN (http://cran.r-project.org/package=knitr) and has detailed documentation and examples (http://yihui.name/knitr/). I think it may be a good idea to organize these materials in a better form, and explain more details about knitr which are not covered in the online documentation. It is also a good opportunity to eat my own dog food and see how knitr performs in the real world.
All the content in this repository is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0, and you are always welcome to participate the writing by forking this repository.
I do not know if this repository can grow into a real book in the end. At the moment, it can be easily turned into an ebook with pandoc, which you can read on iPad or Kindle or other electronic book readers. There are also other formats that you can use, such as HTML or GitHub markdown. The conversion is simple if you have installed pandoc:
./knit epub # EPub ebook
./knit html # a single html page
./knit pdf # PDF through XeLaTeX
./knit github # markdown for githubI use the above commands to knit my source documents and convert them into different formats. I work under Ubuntu, and the bash script ./knit may not work for your OS (it is essentially an R script), but you are encouraged to read its source code to know what is happening behind the scene.
All source files are under the source directory, and all the rest of markdown files are the output from knitr. If you want to modify anything in this repository, please always go to the source directory. In other words, only manage the source, and forget about the output.
Currently I need help on designing the CSS styles for the HTML and EPub output; I do not have much time for that. The default style is not optimal for reading. You are welcome to contribute if you know pandoc and CSS, and you can probably look at bootstrap for an appealing design.
If you have more time to kill, I also need help on the TeX style so that the PDF output looks better. I just picked up three free fonts in my library and throwed them to XeLaTeX.