[R] Hadley's book: paper/PDF/etc. versus github

[Greg Snow]

Hadley, have you tried producing the book in other electronic formats
(other than pdf)? such as epub?  I tried and ended up with a file that
worked, but all the example code was missing (which defeats the
convenience of having it on an ebook reader), I did not check if
everything else was there or not.

 thanks,

On Fri, Oct 3, 2014 at 6:37 AM, Hadley Wickham <h.wickham at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi, folks.  I've got a sort of coupon that would allow me to get a
>> copy of "Advanced R" by Hadley Wickham at no cost.  OTOH, I've already
>> cloned the github repository, and having the "live" Rmd files (or in
>> this case, rmd files) is enormously more useful to me than having any
>> form of electronic or paper format.
>
> I presume you mean https://github.com/hadley/adv-r (no need to be
> secretive about it ;)
>
>> The only reason I can think of for getting, say, a PDF version of the
>> book is that corrected versions of such books are sometimes (always?)
>> made available for free if you've already got the PDF version of the
>> book.  (I know O'Reilly does this.)
>
> The pdf version of the book is made from the files in that repo, so I
> don't see any advantage there.  (You can build the pdf yourself if you
> spend a few minutes looking for the right file ;)
>
>> But if the github version is going to continue to exist, be updated,
>> and be generally available, that's even better.  IS it going to exist,
>> be updated, and be generally available?  Any thoughts?
>
> The github version _is_ the authoritative version of the book (and in
> some sense it's already slightly better than the book, since a number
> of minor typos have been fixed since the book was published). C&H is
> mostly print on demand, so later printings of the book are likely to
> pick up the improvements, although there is still some additional
> human checking in the process, so it'll only get updated every 6
> months or so.
>
> The repo and http://adv-r.had.co.nz will continue to exist for the
> foreseeable future.
>
> Hadley
>
> --
> http://had.co.nz/
>
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-- 
Gregory (Greg) L. Snow Ph.D.
538280 at gmail.com