As promised, I'm going to announce the winners of the 1st Bookdown Contest today. First of all, I'd like to thank all people who participated this contest. I happily spent a whole week on reviewing all the 43 submissions. Then I had a hard time wrestling with myself because it was so hard to pick the best entries. On one hand, (in theory) I had to make 43 * (43 - 1) = 903 pairwise comparisons to decide the winners. On the other hand, the number of submissions which I thought should receive the awards is certainly bigger than what I planned (1 + 2 + 10). In the end, I decided to slightly increase the number of awards to 1 + 3 + 12, so that I could stop banging my head against the wall. That said, I still strongly believe some other submissions are worth mentioning in this announcement (which I'll do in the a reply after this announcement).
Before I announce the winners, let me share a nice graph to illustrate the purpose of the contest. I came across a package named aggiedown two weeks ago. After I looked at its network graph on Github, I felt extremely excited. This, is exactly what I have been hoping to see:
(The above graph was truncated; the actual version is much taller)
In the beginning was Chester Ismay's thesisdown package. Then you can see how other people forked it and made all kinds of derivations: huskydown, gauchodown, wildcatdown, oxdown, sotonthesis, bulldown, beaverdown, ...
Down Down Down! The open source river streaming down! What could be better than that?
With this contest, I want to encourage bookdown users to share your authoring experience and the extensions you have developed to make it even easier for other users to write their own books, reports, and dissertations, etc. I only have two hands and 24 hours a day, and there is still a lot of room for improvement in the bookdown package (e.g., I was not satisfied with the support for the Tufte style in bookdown). I was sure that the community could help. And here we go:
Grand prize
Recipient: @pabloc for Data Science Live Book
Pablo showed the possibility of publishing a book with bookdown all by yourself (i.e., self-publishing). If you are interested in self-publishing books, I courage you to read the two blog posts mentioned in the submission, which covered a lot of useful and practical technical tips.
- How to self-publish a book: A handy list of resources
- How to self publish a book: customizing bookdown
The book is open source on Github (of course!). I hope you could hesitate no more after seeing Pablo's example, and will enjoy the excitement of having a physical copy of your book in your own hands a couple of months later. I'm sure Pablo will be happy to help if you have any questions on self-publishing.
Runner Up Prizes
The three recipients and their work:
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@grimbough's msmbstyle package: Bookdown contest submission: Modern Statistics for Modern Biology & msmbstyle This is a bookdown extension package for the Tufte style. Besides a nice style, it has also provided additional features such as Question/Solution/Exercise blocks. Currently a real book, Modern Statistics for Modern Biology, is being written with this style. @grimbough has also tried to port some of the Tufte features to the Bootstrap style.
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@Xiangyun's master thesis at CUMT (China University of Mining and Technology): Bookdown contest submission: Master Thesis Template from China University of Mining and Technology, Beijing and @pranav.pandya's master thesis at Berlin School of Economics and Law: Bookdown contest submission: a Master's thesis on Global Terrorism (HWR Berlin)
There were several submissions on dissertation/thesis templates, and the above two were picked because 1) the authors have successfully graduated with their degrees, which means they must have won in the constant fight with their graduate schools (I kind of lost in 2013, so they "made it up" for me to some extent); (2) they provided both PDF and web versions of their theses. Pranav's thesis was based on Chester Ismay's thesisdown package. Chester really should have received the award, too, but I think the large number of theses, including Pranav's, is the best award for Chester.
Honorable Mention Prizes
Recipients and their work:
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@colin's backyard package. It has basically provided a GUI for bookdown. It is absolutely amazing. If it were not still work in progress, I'd have to fight with myself for longer.
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@robjhyndman's Monash University templates. Students and faculty in other universities may feel jealousy about these templates, since it seems Monash can escape from the LaTeX world now.
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@jweisber's book "Odds & Ends". It is a beautiful and elegant extension of the Tufte style. I thumbed through the book, and it appeared to be a great book, too!
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@dapeng submitted multiple entries:
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@zachbogart and @jtr13's edav.info/. When will course notes follow the Wikipedia model?
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@ejkasner's University of Washington dissertation template. Features the use of child documents (each chapter as a child document), LaTeX customization, and
bookdown::pdf_document2. -
@martin.arnold's interactive companion to the well-received textbook Introduction to Econometrics (Stock & Watson, 2015).
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@Desautm's Notes for advanced calculus in French (with some interesting LaTeX tricks).
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@robinlovelace's Geocomputation with R, a book containing animations, interactive widgets, and shiny apps. Also a great example of collaboration among multiple authors.
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@bubifengyun's book in Chinese with a large amount of LaTeX customizations, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University thesis.
Congratulations to all recipients! Please email or message me with your preferences of the awards (RStudio t-shirts/mugs) and postal addresses. Once again, many thank to all participants of this contest!
) !