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Web Application Development with R Using Shiny
Web Application Development with R Using Shiny
- GenresNonfiction
110 pages, Paperback
Published October 22, 2013
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