Mastering Shiny

by Hadley Wickham

Master the Shiny web framework—and take your R skills to a whole new level. By letting you move beyond static reports, Shiny helps you create fully interactive web apps for data analyses. Users will be able to jump between datasets, explore different subsets or facets of the data, run models with parameter values of their choosing, customize visualizations, and much more. Hadley Wickham from RStudio shows data scientists, data analysts, statisticians, and scientific researchers with no knowledge of HTML, CSS, or JavaScript how to create rich web apps from R. This in-depth guide provides a learning path that you can follow with confidence, as you go from a Shiny beginner to an expert developer who can write large, complex apps that are maintainable and performant.

Genres: Programming, Coding, Nonfiction

Unknown Binding

First published June 1, 2020

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read most of this book (except the last few chapters which I don't feel a need to read at the moment, but I may revisit later on - especially the chapter on performance).

It is a great introduction to making Shiny apps (using the R programming language) for those that have never made a Shiny app before. For people that are familiar with the basics of Shiny, it is still definitely worth a read as it teaches you lots of new features you probably never knew existed!

I think that this is a good reference book for people wanting to delve into Shiny. There is no need to read every chapter - just the chapters that you feel will help you with your development. I would however recommend reading the chapters on 'Mastering Reactivity', as these offer some invaluable insight into how Shiny operates.

[Kedijik · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is a very good book, probably the best one on shiny as there are few resources to begin with. However, it does play favourites amongst topics and some basic concepts are i think left to the reader to discover on their own. I would have liked more in terms of reactivity, tidy evaluation and security and maybe less on writing packages. Even with familiarity with listeners, i feel like shinys 'grammar of interactivity' still feels a bit alien and syntax bloated. As i dive more into the world of shiny, i am finding interesting results and the book has not maybe prepared me for troubleshooting these the way say ggplot or R books give you an intuition about what the issues are coming from. However i believe over time, it will become more intuitive or be superseeded by a different paradigm.

[Philipp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely useful resource and 'from scratch' introduction to the Shiny framework. Built a humongous internal app using the book, especially chapter 23 Performance helped greatly with knowledge you don't normally find on StackOverflow, ChatGPT. et al.

Highly recommended if you want to build relatively straightforward apps in pure Shiny - I had to dip my toes in CSS and JavaScript as I kept increasing complexity, which obviously are not topics of this book. But you can't find anything better for a basic overview that gets you to 'Advanced' level as you go through.

The free copy lives here.

[Relax, you're doing fine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hadley Wickham worked hard to bring a book for a beginner. He tried to cover all aspects to develop a good Shiny app from front-end, back-end, testing, performance ... so many topics and it's good for a new starter to have an overview.

Reading this book hasn't made you a good Shiny developer but a well worth for your first step.

[Gentian Gashi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hadley Wickham? More like Hadley Sickham. Like any other of his books, it's extremely informative and so beautifully written. He has a knack for explaining difficult concepts in easy-to-digest bits of information.

[GGiorgio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un'ottima risorsa per imparare a utilizzare Shiny: non si limita ai tecnicismi, ma dà anche un'idea della filosofia che ci sta dietro. Ho perciò apprezzato l'approccio didattico e i materiali aggiuntivi. Ho imparato R e Shiny da autodidatta, e mi ha fatto piacere avere conferma di aver programmato molte cose nel modo giusto; ho trovato risposte ad alcune domande e spunti per migliorare i miei progetti.

[O · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another fundamental R book by Hadley. Highly recommended! Thanks!

[Duncan McKinnon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great material, but at the current pace of development many of the tools outlined here may be superceded or further abstracted away in future release. Very useful as a reference if you build shiny apps often (I've been adding apps into markdown reports more frequently after reading this), but may be worth waiting for another release or online docs if you don't have an immediate array of use cases.