Hadley Wickham - Mastering Shiny: Build Interactive Apps, Reports, and Dashboards Powered by R

This book is aimed at two main audiences:

• R users who are interested in learning about Shiny in order to turn their analyses into interactive web apps. To get the most out of this book, you should be comfortable using R to do data analysis and should have written at least a few functions .

• Existing Shiny users who want to improve their knowledge of the theory underlying Shiny in order to write higher-quality apps faster and more easily. You should find this book particularly helpful if your apps are starting to get bigger and youre starting to have problems managing the complexity.

The book is divided into four parts:

1. In , youll learn the basics of Shiny so you can get up and running as quickly as possible. Youll learn about the basics of app structure, useful UI components, and the foundations of reactive programming.

2. builds on the basics to help you solve common problems, including giving feedback to the user, uploading and downloading data, generating UI with code, reducing code duplication, and using Shiny to program the tidyverse.

3. In , youll go deep into the theory and practice of reactive programming, the programming paradigm that underlies Shiny. If youre an existing Shiny user, youll get the most value out of this chapter as it will give you a solid theoretical underpinning that will allow you to create new tools specifically tailored for your problems.

4. Finally, in well finish up with a survey of useful techniques for making your Shiny apps work well in production. Youll learn how to decompose complex apps into functions and modules, how to use packages to organize your code, how to test your code to ensure its correct, and how to measure and improve performance.

The focus of this book is making effective Shiny apps and understanding the underlying theory of reactivity. Ill do my best to showcase best practices for data science, R programming, and software engineering, but youll need other references to master these important skills. If you enjoy my writing in this book, you might enjoy my other books on these topics: R for Data Science, Advanced R, and R Packages.

There are also a number of important topics specific to Shiny that I dont cover:

• This book only covers the built-in user interface toolkit. This doesnt provide the sexiest possible design, but its simple to learn and gets you a long way. If you have additional needs (or just get bored with the defaults), there are a number of other packages that provide alternative frontends. See for more details.

• Deployment of Shiny apps. Putting Shiny into production is outside the scope of this book because it hugely varies from company to company, and much of it is unrelated to R (the majority of challenges tend to be cultural or organizational, not technical). If youre new to Shiny in production, I recommend starting with Joe Chengs 2019 rstudio::conf keynote. That will give you the lay of the land, discussing broadly what putting Shiny into production entails and how to overcome some of the challenges that youre likely to face. Once youve done that, see the RStudio Connect website to learn about RStudios product for deploying apps within your company, and the Shiny website for other common deployment scenarios .