Book Image

Web Application Development with R Using Shiny - Third Edition

By : Chris Beeley, Shitalkumar R. Sukhdeve
Book Image

Web Application Development with R Using Shiny - Third Edition

By: Chris Beeley, Shitalkumar R. Sukhdeve

Overview of this book

Web Application Development with R Using Shiny helps you become familiar with the complete R Shiny package. The book starts with a quick overview of R and its fundamentals, followed by an exploration of the fundamentals of Shiny and some of the things that it can help you do. You’ll learn about the wide range of widgets and functions within Shiny and how they fit together to make an attractive and easy to use application. Once you have understood the basics, you'll move on to studying more advanced UI features, including how to style apps in detail using the Bootstrap framework or and Shiny's inbuilt layout functions. You'll learn about enhancing Shiny with JavaScript, ranging from adding simple interactivity with JavaScript right through to using JavaScript to enhance the reactivity between your app and the UI. You'll learn more advanced Shiny features of Shiny, such as uploading and downloading data and reports, as well as how to interact with tables and link reactive outputs. Lastly, you'll learn how to deploy Shiny applications over the internet, as well as and how to handle storage and data persistence within Shiny applications, including the use of relational databases. By the end of this book, you'll be ready to create responsive, interactive web applications using the complete R (v 3.4) Shiny (1.1.0) suite.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Beginning R and Shiny

R is free and open source, and is the pre-eminent tool for statisticians and data scientists. It has more than 6,000 user-contributed packages, which help users working in fields as diverse as chemistry, biology, physics, finance, psychology, and medical science. R's extremely powerful and flexible statistical graphics greatly help these users in their work.

In recent years, R has become more and more popular, and there are an increasing number of packages for R that 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 when you just start with R, you can build your own interfaces with Shiny and integrate them with your own websites. In this chapter, we're going to cover the following topics:

  • Downloading and installing R
  • Choosing a code-editing environment/IDE
  • Looking at the power of R
  • Learning about how RStudio and contributed packages can make writing code, managing projects, and working with data easier
  • Installing Shiny and running the examples
  • How to use some of Shiny's awesome applications, and some of the elements of the Shiny application that 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 will both encourage you to delve deeper into the bits that interest you and show you places you can go for help if you want to learn more on a particular subject.