Harness the graphical and statistical power of R, and rapidly develop interactive and engaging user interfaces using the superb Shiny package, which makes programming for user interaction simple. R is a highly flexible and powerful tool used for analyzing and visualizing data. Shiny is the perfect companion to R, making it quick and simple to share analysis and graphics from R that users can interact with and query over the Web. Let Shiny do the hard work and spend your time generating content and styling, not writing code to handle user inputs. This book is full of practical examples and shows you how to write cutting-edge interactive content for the Web, right from a minimal example all the way to fully styled and extensible applications.
This book includes an introduction to Shiny and R and takes you all the way to advanced functions in Shiny as well as using Shiny in conjunction with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to produce attractive and highly interactive applications quickly and easily. It also includes a detailed look at other packages available for R, which can be used in conjunction with Shiny to produce dashboards, maps, advanced D3 graphics, among many things.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with R and Shiny!, runs through the basics of statistical graphics, data input, and analysis with R. We also discuss data structures and programming basics in R in order to give you a thorough grounding in R before we look at Shiny.
Chapter 2, Building Your First Application, helps you build your first Shiny application. We begin with simply adding interactive content to a document written in markdown, and then delve deeper into Shiny, building a very primitive minimal example, and finally, looking at more complex applications and the inputs and outputs necessary to build them.
Chapter 3, Building Your Own Web Pages with Shiny, covers how Shiny works with existing web content in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We discuss the Shiny helper functions that allow you to add a custom HTML to a standard Shiny application and how to build a minimal example of a Shiny application in your own raw HTML with Shiny running in the background. Finally, we also discuss using JavaScript/ jQuery with Shiny with examples given to add bells and whistles to an existing application as well as providing powerful interactive tools to communicate between the web page and Shiny using JavaScript.
Chapter 4, Taking Control of Reactivity, Inputs, and Outputs, covers advanced functions in Shiny in detail, in particular, changing the UI based on user input or the state of the application, finely controlling reactivity in your application, and advanced methods used for reading user input as well as specialized graphics and data tables. We also cover debugging, which can pose challenges in Shiny applications.
Chapter 5, Advanced Applications I – Dashboards, contains detailed information of the layout in Shiny applications. We discuss simple ways to use layout functions described earlier in the book, and how to use the Bootstrap style on which Shiny is based. Finally, we also cover how a full dashboard is produced with several pages, specialized input and output widgets, and other advanced features accessible when using Shiny dashboards.
Chapter 6, Advanced Applications II – Using JavaScript Libraries in Shiny Applications, reviews some of the many JavaScript libraries, which can easily be integrated into Shiny, and how to use them in your own Shiny applications. We also cover how to draw graphics, which describe trends and predictions, heatmaps and highly interactive charts using D3, and 3D plots, along with an advice on how best to ensure that they work within Shiny.
Chapter 7, Sharing Your Creations, discusses the many different ways to share Shiny applications with your end users. There are many ways of doing this and they are described in detail, including the use of the Gist and GitHub website, locally using a simple ZIP file, hosting them yourself on your own server, or making use of RStudio's hosting services. We also cover reading and writing data using Shiny in a server (as opposed to a local) environment.
This book can be used with the Windows, Mac, or Linux operating systems. It requires the installation of R as well as several user-contributed packages within R. R and its associated packages are all available for free. The RStudio IDE is recommended because it simplifies some of the tasks covered in this book but are not essential. Again, this software is available free of charge.
This book is for anybody who wants to produce interactive data summaries over the Web, whether you want to share them with a few colleagues or the whole world. No previous experience with R, Shiny, HTML, or CSS is required to begin using this book, although you should possess some previous experience with programming in a different language.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We can see the separation of input code sliderInput() and output code renderPlot()."
A block of code is set as follows:
conditionalPanel(
condition = "input.theTabs == 'trend'",
checkboxInput("smooth", label = "Add smoother?", # add smoother
value = FALSE)
)When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
tabPanel("Trend", plotOutput("trend"),
value = "trend")Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
> runGitHub("basicGoogleAnalytics2ndEdition", "ChrisBeeley")
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Navigate to File | New | R Markdown | New document and enter the code."
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