In this video we'll explore some of the benefits of compiling documents from Rmarkdown vs from .R files. I hope to convince you that Rmarkdown is worth the extra complexity (which is minimal). You may also want to read this recent Introductory R blog, which gives another look at R markdown.

Here we'll look at the basic construction of an Rmarkdown (.rmd) file - the big idea is that R code is contianed in "chunks" within a text document.

Here we'll look in more detail at chunk options in Rmarkdown which control how code and the output of the code is evaluated and displayed. A full listing of chunk options can be found at the knitr website.

After all this looking at how .rmd files are constructed, we'll look at output and see how it is improved over the output from .R files.

Once you start using R you can quickly find it difficult to keep track of your Rmarkdown files (or .R files) and your workspaces, etc. RStudio has a nice "project" feature that makes it simple to save the state of your RStudio window and return to it later.

I would be remiss if I didn't at least mention that knitr also makes it possible to combine LaTeX and R code using .rnw files. If you already use LaTeX this might interest you, or if you have other reasons to learn LaTeX. I honestly find that RMarkdown does everything I need (up to and including EssentialR", but your mileage may vary.