Customer Review
- Reviewed in the United States on January 29, 2014I think that its safe to say that many of us who use Knitr are grateful for the work that Yihui Xie (the author) and others have done to make Knitr available to the R community. Knitr is a very important resource for creating and publishing reproducible research. Which makes this review a challenge since I want to thank the author for his work, but I'm not that wild about the book.
I have been using Knitr for several months, on two projects, one in finance (models for predicting portfolio return using value factors) and one in machine learning. I find that when I work on a large analysis code it is easy to get lost in the code and forget what the pieces do. By including the LaTex text along with the R code I not only get reproducible research, but I get code that is easier to follow (although the mix of LaTex and R has its own problems).
The result is also very attractive. The PDF documents that can be produced with Knitr are much more attractive than documents created with Open Office or Word.
Dynamic Documents with R and Knitr has some good introductory chapters that help you get started. There are a few good guides to creating Knitr documents. If this short book were not $56.95 and if the author got to keep a significant fraction of the money, I would be happier with the book. But it is a short book that is very expensive and my suspicion is that the author only gets a tiny fraction of the cost of the book.
What would have been more useful is a book that included the introductory chapters and then had more Knitr cookbook recipes. There are a some useful pointers but I am constantly looking on-line rather than in the book to answer questions about "how do I do X with Knitr and LaTex". Any significant Knitr paper will have been the result of many searches for material that can't be found in the book.
