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

Chris Beeley

Aug 2018 · Packt Publishing Ltd

About this eBook

Progressively explore UI development with Shiny via practical examplesKey FeaturesWrite a Shiny interface in pure HTMLExplore powerful layout functions to make attractive dashboards and other intuitive interfacesGet to grips with Bootstrap and leverage it in your Shiny applicationsBook Description

Although vanilla Shiny applications look attractive with some layout flexibility, you may still want to have more control over how the interface is laid out to produce a dashboard. Hands-On Dashboard Development with Shiny helps you incorporate this in your applications.

The book starts by guiding you in producing an application based on the diamonds dataset included in the ggplot2 package. You’ll create a single application, but the interface will be reskinned and rebuilt throughout using different methods to illustrate their uses and functions using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You will also learn to develop an application that creates documents and reports using R Markdown. Furthermore, the book demonstrates the use of HTML templates and the Bootstrap framework.

Moving along, you will learn how to produce dashboards using the Shiny command and dashboard package. 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.

What you will learnAdd HTML to a Shiny application and write its interfaces from scratch in HTMLUse built-in Shiny functions to produce attractive and flexible layoutsProduce dashboards, adding icons and notificationsExplore Bootstrap themes to lay out your applicationsGet insights into UI development with hands-on examplesUse R Markdown to create and download reportsWho this book is for

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.

About the author

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, Shiny), with a special emphasis on using the web and Shiny to produce simple and attractive data summaries. Chris is operating firm 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.