The book is broken down into small “recipes” that aim to demonstrate a single concept at a time. Chapter installation provides instructions on how to install the necessary software tools. Chapter conceptual-overview gives a conceptual overview of R Markdown. Chapter basics introduces the basic components of R Markdown, and how to convert between R Markdown documents and R scripts. Chapter document-elements tells you how to generate certain document elements, such as page breaks, bibliographies, numbered figures, animations, diagrams, etc. Chapter formatting shows how to format content, such as adjusting the figure size and alignment. Chapter latex-output introduces tips and tricks for those who only want LaTeX/PDF output. Similarly, Chapter html-output is for HTML users, and Chapter word is for Word users. If you want to produce output documents in multiple output formats (which is often tricky), you may find Chapter multi-formats useful. Chapter tables is, to be honest, my least favorite chapter, but I know a lot of users really want to learn how to produce tables. I’m not an expert on fancy tables, but hope you will at least find the list of packages there helpful. Chapter chunk-options shows some applications of knitr‘s chunk options that you may not know. Chapter output-hooks and Chapter chunk-hooks are a little advanced, but should also be very useful because they show you the great power of being able to control knitr‘s output and behavior with custom hook functions. Chapter knitr-misc introduces a variety of knitr tricks. Chapter other-languages shows examples of using other languages in R Markdown, so you know R Markdown is not only for R. It also teaches you how to make knitr work with a new language that has not been supported yet. Chapter managing-projects introduces tips on managing projects related to R Markdown. Chapter workflow presents some tips on enhancing your workflow.

The recipes in this book are usually independent of each other, so you can pick up any one to read if you do not have a specific goal in mind.