RMarkdown

Introduction to literate programming using RMarkdown

Markdown is a language for producing formatted text with a simple text editor conceived with the idea of being human-readable from source. If you remember Thomas de Graaff’s talk from two weeks ago, having human readable code is important for a number of reasons, such as being easy to debug, maintain, and extend.

RMarkdown is simply a software that allows the implementation of this language in R. This makes it possible to produce open-access, fully reproducible documents.

• Here you can find Asier’s presentation, scripts and additional materials.

• To show you the basics, Asier followed the book R Markdown: The Definitive Guide by Xie, Allaire and Grolemund. He recommends you read the Preface before the workshop. However, as a definitive guide, you can deduce that this book does not only cover the basics, so you can also use it to go deeper.

• Once you have mastered tha basics of RMarkdown, you might want to take a look at the RMarkdown Cookbook

• To have all the main commands at hand, you can print this double-sided RMarkdown cheat sheet. (We love cheat sheets.)

• And for a quick overview of RMarkdown, just watch this video.

• Here you can find an Elsevier template for RMarkdown

Asier is a postdoc at the NSCR and The Hague University of Applied Sciences with a background in criminology. He started specializing in crime analysis with R during his master’s degree and has since developed an interest in open science.