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(This article was first published on <strong><a href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/10/r-manuals-bookdown.html"> Revolutions</a></strong>, and kindly contributed to <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/">R-bloggers)</a> </div>
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<p>While there are hundreds of excellent books and websites devoted to R, the canonical source of truth regarding the R system remains the R manuals. You can find the manuals <a rel="nofollow" href="https://cran.r-project.org/manuals.html" target="_blank">at your local CRAN mirror</a> and on your laptop as part of the R distribution (try <strong>Help > Manuals</strong> in RGui, or <strong>Help > R Help</strong> in RStudio to find them). Unlike books, the R manuals are updated by the R Core Team with every new release, so if you're not sure how the base R system is supposed to work this is the place to check.</p>
<p>Note that the manuals don't cover any of the R packages (other than the <a rel="nofollow" href="http://mran.microsoft.com/rro/installed/#base" target="_blank">base</a> and <a rel="nofollow" href="http://mran.microsoft.com/rro/installed/#recc" target="_blank">recommended</a> packages), so if you want to learn about the wider R ecosystem, well, that's what all those books and websites are for. (<a rel="nofollow" href="http://mran.microsoft.com/" target="_blank">MRAN</a> is one place to start.)</p>
<p>The manuals are available in HTML, PDF, and the ePub e-book format supported by some e-book readers (though not Kindle) and also one file format the Edge browser is actually really useful for. R user Colin Fay recently <a rel="nofollow" href="http://colinfay.me/r-manuals/" target="_blank">converted the manuals to bookdown format</a>, using the ePub file as the source. If you'd like to see some examples of the output of the <a rel="nofollow" href="https://bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown/" target="_blank">bookdown package</a>, I've linked to those conversions below. (Note that for versions of R other than 3.4.2, you'd be better off looking at the CRAN originals — I'm not sure if Colin has plans to make the conversions with each R release.) </p>
<p>As of R 3.4.2, there are six manuals:</p>
<ul>
<li><a rel="nofollow" href="http://colinfay.me/intro-to-r/" target="_blank"><strong>An Introduction to R</strong></a>. This is the guide to base R for programmers new to the language. It covers the basic syntax and data types, base graphics, and the built-in statistical modeling functions. (I have a special fondness for this one <img alt="🙂" src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/2/72x72/1f642.png" class="wp-smiley"> ).</li>
<li><a rel="nofollow" href="http://colinfay.me/r-data-import-export/" target="_blank"><strong>R Data Import/Export</strong></a>. as the name suggest, this covers the systems in base R for getting data into and out of R. Among other topics, it's the primary documentation for the <a rel="nofollow" href="http://mran.microsoft.com/packages/info/?foreign" target="_blank">foreign package</a>, which covers importing data from other statistical tools. This manual also covers a few CRAN packages for accessing <a rel="nofollow" href="http://colinfay.me/r-data-import-export/relational-databases.html" target="_blank">databases</a>, and includes a succinct primer on SQL queries.</li>
<li><a rel="nofollow" href="http://colinfay.me/r-installation-administration/" target="_blank"><strong>R Installation and Administration</strong></a>. This manual covers how to get R, how to install and configure R on Windows, Mac and Unix, and how to manage package libraries. It also includes a useful index of <a rel="nofollow" href="http://colinfay.me/r-installation-administration/environment-variable-index.html" target="_blank">environment variables</a> you can use to configure R.</li>
<li><a rel="nofollow" href="http://colinfay.me/writing-r-extensions/" target="_blank"><strong>Writing R extensions</strong></a>. This one's mainly for the package developers, and covers the process of building, testing and documenting a package. It also provides debugging and performance guides, and how to link other languages and GUIs to R.</li>
<li><a rel="nofollow" href="http://colinfay.me/r-internals/" target="_blank"><strong>R Internals</strong></a>. This is the place to look if you ever delve into the R source code that implements R engine.</li>
<li><strong><a rel="nofollow" href="http://colinfay.me/r-language-definition/" target="_blank">R Language Definition</a></strong>. A formal specification of R's syntax, objects, and evaluation model. </li>
</ul>
<p>Together, these manuals represent more than 500 printed pages of documentation — and that's not counting the 3500-page <a rel="nofollow" href="https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/fullrefman.pdf" target="_blank">reference index of the manual pages</a> for R functions and data types. That's an impressive amount of documentation, even for a system as comprehensive as R! As a reminder, you can find the <a rel="nofollow" href="https://cran.r-project.org/manuals.html" target="_blank">latest versions on CRAN</a>, or see the manuals for R 3.4.2 in bookdown format at the link below.</p>
<p>Colin FAY: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://colinfay.me/r-manuals/" target="_blank">R Manuals as bookdown</a></p>
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