Some pros and cons of using bookdown and quarto to write books

There's a community of people here who use the R language to get stuff done known as the R Usergroup Manchester (RUM). We meet monthly to learn from each other. At the last meetup on 29th June, I gave a joint talk with Stavrina Dimosthenous about quarto.org and its predecessor bookdown.org. Following Stravrina's quick introduction to Quarto, I gave a lightning talk about some of the pros and cons of using bookdown to write books.

Since the talk was recorded, I've posted the video below, which is a lo-fi Microsoft Teams recording, which doesn't include any of the Q&A that followed.

TL:DR; Bookdown and quarto are useful and very well documented tools for publishing books that can help you overcome some of the (many) limitations of Learning Management Systems like Blackboard. If you're writing anything book shaped in your teaching (or elsewhere) I reckon that bookdown/quarto are good tools that are worth learning as they'll help you to get stuff done.

Thanks Kamilla Kopec-Harding for organising and hosting the talks, a promotional poster for which, you can see below.

References

1. Wickham, Hadley, and Garrett Grolemund. 2017. R for Data Science. O'Reilly UK Ltd. r4ds.had.co.nz.
2. Xie, Yihui. 2017. Bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown. Boca Raton, Florida: Chapman; Hall/CRC. bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown.
3. Xie, Yihui, Christophe Dervieux, and Emily Riederer. 2020. R Markdown Cookbook. Boca Raton, Florida: Chapman; Hall/CRC. bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown-cookbook.