A little about me

• R programmer
• Docker fan
• Twitter veteran @znmeb
• Daily fantasy sports (DFS) geek @znmeb_dfs

I’m writing a book about daily fantasy sports analytics!

• Using LeanPub as the storefront: https://leanpub.com/.
• The book landing page on LeanPub: http://dfs.tools.
• The book GitHub repository: https://github.com/znmeb/mastering-dfs-analytics-bookdown
• DFS toolbox Docker image: https://gitlab.com/znmeb/dfs.tools

Where do Bookdown and Netlify fit in?

• Instead of LeanPub’s native tools, I’m using Bookdown.
• The eBook website is a Netlify site! https://www.masteringdfsanalytics.com/

R

“R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It compiles and runs on a wide variety of UNIX platforms, Windows and MacOS.” – https://www.r-project.org/

The Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN)

https://cran.rstudio.com

RStudio®

• Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for reproducible data science
• Desktop and server
• Open source / free + some proprietary / paid
• Main page: https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/
• Preview release downloads: https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/preview/

RStudio use cases / cheatsheets

• Cheatsheet Page
• RStudio IDE
• Data Wrangling
• Data Visualization
• R Package Development
• R Markdown Authoring

R Markdown

• Reproducible document authoring environment
• Author writes in R Markdown.
  • Markdown + executable code chunks
• R Markdown renders the document:
  • Markdown is converted to output format(s).
  • Code chunks are syntax highlighted, executed and their results inserted in the output.
• http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/

Types of R Markdown outputs

• PDFs via LaTeX: https://www.latex-project.org/get/
  • In major Linux distro package repositories
  • MikTeX on Windows: http://miktex.org/
  • MacTeX on MacOS: http://www.tug.org/mactex/
• Word / OpenOffice / LibreOffice documents
• HTML:
  • Presentations (including this one!)
  • Dashboards
  • Bookdown eBooks

Bookdown

1. Website: https://bookdown.org/
2. Textbook: Bookdown: Authoring Books with R Markdown https://bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown/
3. Demo site / project template: https://github.com/rstudio/bookdown-demo

What is Bookdown?

“The bookdown package is a free and open-source R package built on top of R Markdown to make it really easy to write books and long-form articles/reports. Markdown is a very simple language but made powerful thanks to Pandoc, and bookdown has added a few important missing features related to writing books, such as figure/table caption numbering and cross-references, and embedding HTML widgets or Shiny apps.” - https://bookdown.org/home/about.html

Bookdown outputs

1. A book website in one of three HTML formats:
   • “GitBook” style - like GitBook with some advanced features
   • “Bootstrap” style - uses the Bootstrap framework / navigation
   • “Tufte” style - text columns with “sidenotes” for equations / graphs
2. EPUB eBook
3. With additional software, can make PDFs and Kindle eBooks

What you will need

1. A laptop or workstation (Linux, Windows or MacOS)
2. Git: https://git-scm.com/
3. A Netlify account: https://app.netlify.com/
4. The Netlify command line interface: https://www.netlify.com/docs/cli
5. R: https://cran.rstudio.com
6. RStudio Preview Release: https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/preview/
7. If you want to make PDFs, you’ll need LaTeX: https://www.latex-project.org/get/

Installing Bookdown

1. Start RStudio.
2. In the R console (lower left panel) type install.packages("bookdown", quiet = TRUE).

Creating the project

1. Clone the RStudio bookdown-demo project: git clone https://github.com/rstudio/bookdown-demo.
2. Open the project in RStudio (upper right menu).

Edit _output.yml

• The demo project creates a PDF eBook via LaTeX.
• If you don’t have LaTeX, you can edit a configuration file called _output.yml and remove the PDF generation code (blue shaded lines):

Rendering the book

1. If you’re not on the “Build” tab in the upper right, select it.
2. Press the “Build Book” button.
3. The rendered book website will open in a new window.

Rendered book website

Book website controls (left to right)

1. “Hamburger” - toggles display of contents on the left
2. Search - a search inside the book
3. Font - selects serif or sans serif, background color
4. Edit - links to the book’s GitHub repository for editing
5. Download - links to the downloadable eBook files

Deploying to Netlify

1. The “Build” creates a directory called _book.
2. In the “Tools” menu, select “Shell” to open a terminal.

3. Type

   cd _book
   netlify deploy

It worked!

Next steps

1. You’ve deployed the demo from RStudio.
2. Read Bookdown: Authoring Books with R Markdown.
3. Use the demo as a template, write your own book.
4. Deploy.
5. ????
6. Profit!

Want some help?

1. I’m on Twitter! @znmeb
2. You can file issues at https://gitlab.com/znmeb/dfs.tools/issues/new

License

Note: RStudio® and Shiny® are trademarks of RStudio, Inc.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.