Chris Beeley - Hands-On Dashboard Development with Shiny: A practical guide to building effective web applications and dashboards

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Chris Beeley is the author of Web Application Development with R Using Shiny. He has been using R and other open source software for 10 years to better capture, analyze, and visualize data in the healthcare sector in the UK. He works full-time developing software to store, collate, and present questionnaire data using open technologies (MySQL, PHP, R, and Shiny), with a special emphasis on using the web and Shiny to produce simple and attractive data summaries. He is attempting to expand the use of R and Shiny both within his own organization and throughout the rest of the health sector, as well as enabling his organization to better use a variety of other data science tools. He has also delivered talks about Shiny all over the country.

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Shiny is a framework for the R language that allows you to very easily produce powerful and attractive applications over the web. This allows your user to explore, analyze, and download data and analyses straight from their web browser. In this book, you will learn how to create flexible layouts and have full control over the layout of the dashboard and application.

This book helps you to create, reskin, and rebuild your application using methods such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and style sheets. Y ou will learn how to produce dashboards using the Shiny command and dashboard package and how to use HTML templates and the Bootstrap framework. Finally, you will learn how to lay out applications using a wide range of built-in functions.

By the end of the book, you will have an understanding of the principles that underpin layout in Shiny applications, including sections of HTML added to a vanilla Shiny application, HTML interfaces written from scratch, dashboards, navigation bars, and interfaces.

If you have some experience writing Shiny applications and want to use HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap to make custom interfaces, then this book is for you.

, HTML and Shiny , explains how to modify Shiny applications with built-in functions, HTML, and CSS. You will also learn how to create a application to download reports using R Markdown.

, Layout Functions in Shiny , covers the use of the Bootstrap framework and explains more about laying out your application. You will be building an application from scratch using Shiny Bootstrap-based functions.

, Dashboards , goes through the creation of dashboards using Shiny functions and the shiny dashboard package. We make use of notifications, messages, tasks, icons, and info boxes to build our dashboard.

You require a basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and RStudio, and vanilla Shiny installed on your system.

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