<li>Limit the width of your code (80 columns?)</li>
<li>Author suggests indentation of 4 spaces at minimum</li>
<li>Limit the length of individual functions</li>
</ol>
<h2>What is Markdown?</h2>
<p>Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it structurally to valid XHTML/HTML</p>
<h2>Markdown Syntax</h2>
<p><code>*This text will appear italicized!*</code></p>
<p><em>This text will appear italicized!</em></p>
<p><code>**This text will appear bold!**</code></p>
<p><strong>This text will appear bold</strong></p>
<p><code>## This is a secondary heading</code></p>
<p>I spent so much time reading <ahref="http://www.r-bloggers.com/"title="R bloggers">R bloggers</a> and <ahref="http://simplystatistics.org/"title="Simply Statistics">Simply Statistics</a>!</p>
<p>Newlines require a double space after the end of a line</p>
<h2>What is Markdown?</h2>
<p>Created by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz. It is a simplified version of "markup" languages. It allows one to focus on writing as opposed to formatting. Markdown provides a simple, minimal, and intuitive way of formatting elements. </p>
<p>You can easily convert Markdown to valid HTML (and other formats) using existing tools.</p>
<h2>What is R Markdown?</h2>
<p>R Markdown is the integration of R code with markdown. It allows one to create documents containing "live" R code. R code is evaluated as part of the processing of the markdown and its results are inserted into the Markdown document. R Markdown is a core tool in <strong>literate statistical programming</strong></p>
<p>R Markdown can be converted to standard markdown using <code>knitr</code> package in R. Markdown can then be converted to HTML using the <code>markdown</code> package in R. This workflow can be easily managed using R Studio. One can create powerpoint like slides using the <code>slidify</code> package.</p>
<h2>Problems, Problems</h2>
<ul>
<li>Authors must undertake considerable effort to put data/results on the web</li>
<li>Readers must download data/results individually and piece together which data go with which code sections, etc.</li>
<li>Authors/readers must manually interact with websites</li>
<li>There is no single documents to integrate data analysis with textual representations; i.e data, code, and text are not linked</li>
</ul>
<p>One of the ways to resolve this is to simply put the data and code together in the same document so that people can execute the code in the right order, and the data are read at the right times. You can have a single document that integrates the data analysis with all the textual representations.</p>
<h2>Literate Statistical Programming</h2>
<ul>
<li>Original idea comes from Don Knuth</li>
<li>An article is a stream of <strong>text</strong> and <strong>code</strong></li>
<li>Analysis code is divded into text and code "chunks"</li>