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The Revamped bookdown.org Website

Written by Yihui Xie
2018-07-25

Since we announced the bookdown package in 2016, there have been a large number of books, reports, notes, and tutorials written with this package and published to https://bookdown.org. We were excited to see that! At the same time, however, maintaining the list of books on bookdown.org has become more and more difficult because I must update the list manually to filter out books that are only skeletons or not built with bookdown (such as slides). It was not only time-consuming for me, but also delayed the exhibition of many awesome books.

The bookdown logo

Today I’m happy to introduce the revamped bookdown.org website and to let you know how you may contribute your books there or help us improve the website. The full source of the website is hosted in the rstudio/bookdown.org repository on Github (special thanks to Christophe Dervieux and TC Zhang for the great help).

The archive page

We list all books published to bookdown.org, that have substantial content, on the Archive page. This page also contains a few books published elsewhere (e.g., Fundamentals of Data Visualization by Claus O. Wilke). The list is automatically generated by scraping the homepages of books. If you see any information that is not accurate about your own book on this page, you may need to correct the information in your book source documents (e.g., index.Rmd) and re-publish the book. Then we can scrape your book again to reflect the correct information. You can also contribute links to your books published elsewhere by submitting pull requests on Github. Please read the About page for detailed instructions.

The homepage

On the homepage, we feature a small subset of books written in bookdown. These books are typically either published or nearly complete. If you see an interesting/useful book written in bookdown, you may suggest that we add it to the homepage, no matter if you are its author or not. Again, please see the About page for instructions.

The tags page

To make it a little easier for you to find the books that you are interested in, we created a list of tags to classify books on the Tags page. The current classification method is quite rudimentary, however. We only match the tags against the descriptions of books. In the future, we may support custom keywords or tags in the bookdown package, so authors can provide their own tags. You are welcome to submit pull requests to improve the existing tags.

The authors page

We also list all books by authors on the Authors page. Note that if a book has multiple authors, they are listed together, and the book is not displayed on the individual author’s cards.

So they have authored 195 books. Where is yours?

We are happy (as happy as Colin Fay) to see that it is totally practical to publish books with bookdown and enjoy the simplicity of R Markdown at the same time. For authors, if we missed your excellent book on bookdown.org, please do not hesitate to add it yourself. The best time to write a book was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. We are looking forward to your own book on bookdown.org, and we hope readers will enjoy all these free and open-source books on bookdown.org.

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