I don’t remember when I first heard about R Notebooks, but it was quite a while ago. I finally decided to investigate them last weekend, and I’m hooked. I expect to be doing much of my R work in R notebooks from now on. For purposes of reproducibility, I still plan to extract R code from what are referred to as “chunks” to produce standalone R scripts that I can rerun from the R console to verify my results, but the interactive notebooks will allow me to run chunks as I’m developing new code and to document what I’m doing.
The link above will take you to documentation on R Notebooks. The only downside to them is that to use them you have to use RStudio. That’s not a big downside, since there is a free version available, but I’m still enough of an old fogey that my fingers are used to Emacs, and Emacs is where I generally prefer to edit code. It will take me a while to develop a new workflow, but you can be sure that it will include R Notebooks.
I produced a Randomization demo very quickly once I updated my version of RStudio. I produced HTML simply by saving my notebook to disk. The .nb.html file was automatically produced in the same directory. All I had to do was to upload it to an appropriate directory here. If you have a recent version of RStudio that supports R Notebooks, you can download the Markdown code using the “Code” dropdown at the top right of the page. Simply open the .Rmd file, and RStudio will open it as a notebook. You can then execute chunks yourself to redo the simulation in any way that you care to. That’s even easier than copying and pasting the code I posted earlier.