We used books and R primarily for examples in this book, but bookdown is not only for books or R. Most features introduced in this book also apply to other types of publications: journal papers, reports, dissertations, course handouts, study notes, and even novels. You do not have to use R, either. Other choices of computing languages include Python, C, C++, SQL, Bash, Stan, JavaScript, and so on, although R is best supported. You can also leave out computing, for example, to write a fiction. This book itself is an example of publishing with bookdown and R Markdown, and its source is fully available on GitHub.
Yihui Xie is a software engineer at RStudio. He is the author of several R packages, and interested in statistical computing, data visualization, and web technologies. He founded the largest online community for statistics "Capital of Statistics" in China in 2006. After publishing a few journal papers, a PhD thesis, and the book Dynamic Documents with R and knitr, the frustration with LaTeX eventually led to the creation of bookdown.