Chris has been a keen user of R and a passionate advocate of open-source tools within research and healthcare settings since completing his PhD. He has made extensive use of R (and Shiny) to automate analysis and reporting for new patient feedback websites. 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 Center.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank all the staff, service users, and carers at the Involvement Center in Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust, not only for welcoming me and believing in me but also for making my work meaningful. Helping to better understand and communicate with our service users and carers is the reason why I get out of bed in the morning and work long hours on the website. The book was made much easier with the thought that it might help transform healthcare for everyone's benefit.
I'd like to give a massive thank you to the whole R world, the R core team, the people at RStudio, Joe Cheng, Winston Chang, Hadley Wickham (what was life like before ggplot2?) and all the people I've had so much help from over the years, on mailing lists, forums, blog posts, and wherever else I've found you. Everyone who believes in free and open source believes that by cooperating and sharing we can build a better world, and this is a profound message not just in the world of software, but globally everywhere. I could never hope to give back as much to this community as I've taken already, but I promise to try.
I would also like to thank my wife and son who helped me remember that there's more to life than coding and work, and are, in general, the complete opposite of writing a book about an R package.
About the Reviewers
Neependra Khare has around 9 years of experience in the IT industry. He has worked as a SysAdmin, support engineer, and a filesystem developer. Currently he is working with Red Hat as Principal Software Engineer.
As a data enthusiast, he uses R and Shiny to do the analysis and publish visualizations. More can be found out about him on his website at www.neependra.net.
Ram Narasimhan works in the Data Science group at GE Global Research. He has worked in applied data analysis for over 15 years, including working as a data consultant in multiple verticals (transportation, manufacturing, and supply chain) where his tools of choice were Python and R. He created and managed a data analytics team for United Airlines in Chicago. He has a Master's in Industrial Engineering and a Doctorate in Operations Research.
Hernn G. Resnizky is an experienced Sociologist and Data Analyst with a Masters degree in Data Mining from the University of Buenos Aires. He currently works for Despegar.com, the leading online tourism agency in Latin America, and has previously worked for other top-level companies, such as Microsoft and Ipsos. Currently, Hernn is focused on working with R, covering not only the Data Analysis stage but also Data Extraction, Processing, and Visualization. In his blog, www.hernanresnizky.com (also known as My Data Atelier ), you can find commented material regarding R and Data Analysis in general.
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I would like to dedicate this book to my dad who always believed in me. I hope I'm still making him proud.
Preface
Harness the graphical and statistical power of R, and rapidly develop interactive and engaging user interfaces using the superb Shiny package which makes programming for user interaction simple. R is a highly flexible and powerful tool for analyzing and visualizing data. Shiny is the perfect companion to R, making it quick and simple to share analysis and graphics from R that users can interact with and query over the Web. Let Shiny do the hard work and spend your time generating content and styling, not writing code to handle user inputs. This book is full of practical examples and shows you how to write cutting-edge interactive content for the Web, right from a minimal example all the way to fully styled and extendible applications.