Web Application Development with R Using Shiny

Integrate the power of R with the simplicity of Shiny to deliver cutting-edge analytics over the web

About This Book

• Use Shiny's built-in functions to produce engaging user interfaces, and integrate them into your own web pages
• Implement powerful user-contributed packages to access graphics from the web, make your own dashboards, use interactive maps, and more
• Extend Shiny using JavaScript and jQuery with minimal coding using this handy, step-by-step guide

Who This Book Is For

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.

What You Will Learn

• Build interactive applications using Shiny's built-in widgets
• Use the built-in layout functions in Shiny to produce user-friendly applications
• Integrate Shiny applications with web pages and customize them using HTML and CSS
• Harness the power of JavaScript and jQuery to customize your applications
• Engage your users and build better analytics using interactive plots
• Debug your applications using Shiny's built-in functions
• Deliver simple and powerful analytics across your organization using Shiny dashboards
• Share your applications with colleagues or over the Internet using cloud services or your own server

In Detail

R is a highly flexible and powerful tool for analyzing and visualizing data. Most of the applications built using various libraries with R are desktop-based. But what if you want to go on the web? Here comes Shiny to your rescue!

Shiny allows you to create interactive web applications using the excellent analytical and graphical capabilities of R. This book will guide you through basic data management and analysis with R through your first Shiny application, and then show you how to integrate Shiny applications with your own web pages. Finally, you will learn how to finely control the inputs and outputs of your application, along with using other packages to build state-of-the-art applications, including dashboards.

Chris Beeley has been using R and other open source software for ten years to better capture, analyze, and visualize data in the healthcare sector in the UK. He is the author of Web Application Development with R Using Shiny. He works full-time, developing software to store, collate, and present questionnaire data using open technologies (MySQL, PHP, R, and Shiny), with a particular emphasis on using the web and Shiny to produce simple and attractive data summaries. Chris is working hard to increase the use of R and Shiny, both within his own organization and throughout the rest of the healthcare sector, as well to enable his organization to better use a variety of other data science tools. Chris has also delivered talks about Shiny all over the country.