Doing reproducible research with R Markdown

Since the concepts and methods of reproducible research have their own range of topics that could easily fill several books, we would like to focus on the abilities of R Markdown in conjunction with RStudio in this chapter. But first, we will give you a few introductory statements.

What is Markdown?

	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, and then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).
	--John Gruber, Creator of Markdown (http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/)

This simplification, and the fact that it is akin to the markup language, enables authors to perform a fast and intuitive formatting of text. Following are some examples:

• The use of hashes will create headlines:

  # This is an H1 heading
  
  ## This is an H2 heading
  
  ### This is an H3 heading
  
  #### This is an H4 heading

• If you want to create an ordered list, you...