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Web Application Development with R Using Shiny: Build Stunning Graphics and Interactive Data Visualizations to Deliver Cutting-Edge Analytics Over the Web
Analyze, communicate, and design your own sophisticated and interactive web applications using the R Shiny package
Key Features Explore the power of the R Shiny package to make interactive web applications easily and efficiently. Learn to create engaging user interfaces using elements like HTML5 Shiny Tags, Sliders and Tabsets. Build and deploy your interactive Shiny web application to web through shinyapps.io that is Shiny server running service. Book DescriptionShiny, a package from RStudio that makes it incredibly easy to build interactive web applications using the excellent analytical and graphical capabilities of R. It lets users to create apps which are automatically “live” in the same way that spreadsheets are live and works in any R environment.
The guide will make the learner familiar to the complete R Shiny package to develop scalable web applications. It starts with giving a quick overview about R and its fundamentals. Then the book moves ahead explaining exactly what Shiny is and the Shiny app directory. It moves further explaining the widgets and input-output list elements with their role in shinyServer. It then goes ahead with different application development practices and the application layout. It will also explain the user interface elements like HTML5 Shiny Tags, Sliders and Tabsets.
It will explain the updated features like building dynamic UI with the new shinytheme package or Bootstrap . It will also introduce the new extension shinyjs for improving user interaction and user experience.
The guide will then explain the Showcase mode and description file and how to use the Reactive Dependency Chain. It then shows the usage of various Shiny extensions like DataTables, dygraphs, shinyRGL.
The book then ends up with deploying your Shiny app on Shinyapps.io that is a Shiny server running service that allows Rstudio users to directly publish app to web.
By the end of the book the learner would be ready to create responsive, interactive web applications using the complete R Shiny suite.
What you will learn Customize and build interactive applications using Shiny's built-in widgets like sliders, drop down lists, numeric inputs and many more. Integrate Shiny applications with web pages and customize them using HTML and CSS. Harness the power of JavaScript and jQuery to customize your applications. Build dashboards with predefined UI and layouts. Engage your users and build better analytics using interactive plots. Understand reactivity at a conceptual level to build apps that are more efficient, robust, and correct. Share your applications with colleagues or over the Internet using cloud services or your own server. Who This Book Is ForThe book is for anyone who is interested in creating compelling web applications and interactive data visualization over the web using Shiny. Programming experience with R is required.
About the AuthorChris Beeley works for Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust as the lead
Analyst and programmer for staff and patient experience. He uses a variety of open source tools (PHP/MySQL, Apache, R, Shiny, and Ubuntu) to collect, collate, analyze, and report on patient and staff experience throughout the organization. He was the author of the previous edition of this book.
He has been a keen user of R and a passionate advocate of open source tools in research and healthcare settings, having completed his PhD.
- GenresNonfiction
238 pages, Paperback
Published September 27, 2018
16 people are currently reading
40 people want to read
About the author
Chris Beeley
3 booksChris Beeley works for Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust as the lead analyst and programmer for staff and patient experience. He uses a variety of open source tools (PHP/MySQL, Apache, R, Shiny, and Ubuntu) to collect, collate, analyze, and report on patient and staff experience throughout the organization.
He has been a keen user of R and a passionate advocate of open source tools in research and healthcare settings, having completed his PhD. He has made extensive use of R (and Shiny) to automate analysis and report on a new patient feedback website. This was funded by a grant from the NHS Institute for Innovation and made in collaboration with staff, service users, and carers within the Trust, particularly individuals from the Involvement Centre.
He has been a keen user of R and a passionate advocate of open source tools in research and healthcare settings, having completed his PhD. He has made extensive use of R (and Shiny) to automate analysis and report on a new patient feedback website. This was funded by a grant from the NHS Institute for Innovation and made in collaboration with staff, service users, and carers within the Trust, particularly individuals from the Involvement Centre.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 24, 2014
Full disclosure: I was given a free review copy of this book by the publisher. This review refers to the ebook version.
Shiny is elegant and simple way to share interactive R analyses on the web. It is essentially a domain-specific language for producing HTML from R in the UI file plus a set of simple server wrapper functions for the business logic of your analysis. This simplicity will appeal to amateur and professional data scientists/statisticians who are interested in getting their work out there with minimum fuss and for whom web development is not their primary focus.
If you are an R user planning to use Shiny at all, then you want to be getting this book. It really gets across the simplicity of the framework; it is well laid out and covers a range of main features from controlling analyses with html buttons and sliders to more advanced graphics options and animation. Referring to this book is far less hassle than trawling through help files and forums.
There are a few problems with the book, however. First, the examples are all rather lightweight. I would have liked the book to build up to one big, complex, showstopper app that really showed off the power of the Shiny platform. Second, I was unsure of the audience that the book was aimed at. It states at the beginning that “You need no previous experience with R, Shiny, HTML or CSS to begin using this book” and the first chapter is a very cursory introduction to installing and using R. Frankly, you would not want to be learning R itself from this book so a lot of this very basic introductory material seems superfluous. Later on, the book casually drops in references to Javascript, JQuery and custom html tags with barely a mention. I would guess that most people interested in this book are already familiar with R, so I would have much preferred a gentle introduction to web development than one on basic R syntax and data structures. Lastly, the book is very light on details for using the shiny-server for hosting on your own servers – it basically just says “Go and look at the documentation”.
That said, this book is a solid introduction to Shiny and would be an important addition to any data scientist’s library. There is plenty of room though for a future cookbook-style guide to fill in some of the gaps.
Shiny is elegant and simple way to share interactive R analyses on the web. It is essentially a domain-specific language for producing HTML from R in the UI file plus a set of simple server wrapper functions for the business logic of your analysis. This simplicity will appeal to amateur and professional data scientists/statisticians who are interested in getting their work out there with minimum fuss and for whom web development is not their primary focus.
If you are an R user planning to use Shiny at all, then you want to be getting this book. It really gets across the simplicity of the framework; it is well laid out and covers a range of main features from controlling analyses with html buttons and sliders to more advanced graphics options and animation. Referring to this book is far less hassle than trawling through help files and forums.
There are a few problems with the book, however. First, the examples are all rather lightweight. I would have liked the book to build up to one big, complex, showstopper app that really showed off the power of the Shiny platform. Second, I was unsure of the audience that the book was aimed at. It states at the beginning that “You need no previous experience with R, Shiny, HTML or CSS to begin using this book” and the first chapter is a very cursory introduction to installing and using R. Frankly, you would not want to be learning R itself from this book so a lot of this very basic introductory material seems superfluous. Later on, the book casually drops in references to Javascript, JQuery and custom html tags with barely a mention. I would guess that most people interested in this book are already familiar with R, so I would have much preferred a gentle introduction to web development than one on basic R syntax and data structures. Lastly, the book is very light on details for using the shiny-server for hosting on your own servers – it basically just says “Go and look at the documentation”.
That said, this book is a solid introduction to Shiny and would be an important addition to any data scientist’s library. There is plenty of room though for a future cookbook-style guide to fill in some of the gaps.
January 23, 2014
Here is a quick book review for those who are interested in developing Shiny web apps.
The book begins with a short but essential introduction to some key R functions for handling data and graphics. Chapter 2 is a walk-through of key Shiny components nicely demonstrated by an example of Google Analytics API integration. It then discusses how Shiny can be further extended with the use of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and jQuery. I find chapter 4 most useful as it goes deep into the practical aspects of handling reactivity and taking full control of inputs and outputs. The book ends with some tips on code sharing and browser compatibility.
I find this book really useful as I am trying to implement new functionality and ideas into my CrimeMap (http://bit.ly/bib_crimemap). It illustrates very well what you can do with Shiny using lots of practical examples.
The book begins with a short but essential introduction to some key R functions for handling data and graphics. Chapter 2 is a walk-through of key Shiny components nicely demonstrated by an example of Google Analytics API integration. It then discusses how Shiny can be further extended with the use of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and jQuery. I find chapter 4 most useful as it goes deep into the practical aspects of handling reactivity and taking full control of inputs and outputs. The book ends with some tips on code sharing and browser compatibility.
I find this book really useful as I am trying to implement new functionality and ideas into my CrimeMap (http://bit.ly/bib_crimemap). It illustrates very well what you can do with Shiny using lots of practical examples.
April 4, 2017
This is a really book on web development with R using Shiny. Even for an experienced Shiny developer, there's a lot of things that you might know...so I had a great time reading it. Lots of simple but useful examples...
January 25, 2014
(Disclaimer: I was given a free copy of the book from the publisher to review)
If you are a data scientist who is not also a web developer, and have been using R for data analyses already, Shiny Server is a fantastic new package that will enable you to quickly put together great looking web dashboards with all the power of R at your fingertips.
I learned about Shiny late in 2012 and started using it regularly early last year. Without a book to guide me in those early days, I basically used the Shiny forum on Google Groups and the Shiny website which has a nice tutorial to follow.
What I really wanted during that time was a book like Beeley's introduction here. He basically takes you through all the necessary steps in putting together Shiny websites. Shiny has a fairly steep learning curve and some advanced concepts like reactive functions, which are covered here fairly completely.
Basically, if you have heard about Shiny and are interested (you probably are, if you're reading this, right?) already, this book is a no-brainer as an introduction right now, especially with nothing else on the market as of this review.
If you are a data scientist who is not also a web developer, and have been using R for data analyses already, Shiny Server is a fantastic new package that will enable you to quickly put together great looking web dashboards with all the power of R at your fingertips.
I learned about Shiny late in 2012 and started using it regularly early last year. Without a book to guide me in those early days, I basically used the Shiny forum on Google Groups and the Shiny website which has a nice tutorial to follow.
What I really wanted during that time was a book like Beeley's introduction here. He basically takes you through all the necessary steps in putting together Shiny websites. Shiny has a fairly steep learning curve and some advanced concepts like reactive functions, which are covered here fairly completely.
Basically, if you have heard about Shiny and are interested (you probably are, if you're reading this, right?) already, this book is a no-brainer as an introduction right now, especially with nothing else on the market as of this review.
April 29, 2017
OK introduction to Shiny
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews