R is free and open source as well as being the pre-eminent tool for statisticians and data scientists. It has more than 6000 user-contributed packages, which help users with tasks as diverse as chemistry, biology, physics, finance, psychology, and medical science, as well as drawing extremely powerful and flexible statistical graphics.
In recent years, R has become more and more popular, and there are an increasing number of packages for R, which make cleaning, analyzing, and presenting data on the web easy for everybody. The Shiny package, in particular, makes it incredibly easy to deliver interactive data summaries and queries to end users through any modern web browser. You're reading this book because you want to use these powerful and flexible tools for your own content.
This book will show you how, right from starting with R, to build your own interfaces with Shiny and integrate them with your own websites. In this chapter, we're going to cover the following:
Download and install R and choose a code editing environment/IDE
Look at the power of R and learn about how RStudio and contributed packages can make writing code, managing projects, and working with data easier
Install Shiny and run the examples
Take a look at some awesome Shiny applications and some of the elements of the Shiny application we will build over the course of this book
R is a big subject, and this is a whistle-stop tour; so if you get a little lost along the way, don't worry. This chapter is really all about showing you what's out there and encouraging you to delve deeper into the bits that interest you and showing you places you can go for help if you want to learn more on a particular subject.