Getting Started with R and Shiny

Below is a collection of resources for getting started in R and Shiny. They are listed roughly in the order that we would expect a motivated beginner to work through them.

Nick put together some additional resources that he found useful during his learning process in nicks_fav_resourses.md.

Getting Stated with R

• Download R here: https://cran.r-project.org/
• Download the free version of Rstudio here: https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/
• Getting Started with R: https://rladiessydney.org/courses/ryouwithme/
• R4DS: https://r4ds.had.co.nz/
  • note: I recommend skimming through the above book and trying out examples. Skip over sections that you do not understand, and you can come back to them later.

Getting Started with GitHub

• Create a GitHub account: https://github.com/ . You may need to install git first from here: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Getting-Started-Installing-Git
• If you are not familiar with git, this article gives a nice overview: https://jahya.net/blog/git-vs-github/
• Try out example 1 from this tutorial: https://github.com/bcgov/bcgov-data-science-resources/wiki/Tutorial:-Intro-to-Git-&-GitHub-for-the-R-User

A Deeper Dive into R

• Fundamental chapters in Advanced R
  • http://adv-r.had.co.nz/Data-structures.html
  • http://adv-r.had.co.nz/Subsetting.html
  • http://adv-r.had.co.nz/Style.html
• Introduction to the dplyr package for data manipulation: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/dplyr/vignettes/dplyr.html

Getting Started with Shiny

What is Shiny from Rstudio:

Shiny is an open source R package that provides an elegant and powerful web framework for building web applications using R. Shiny helps you turn your analyses into interactive web applications without requiring HTML, CSS, or JavaScript knowledge.

• Into to Shiny book: https://laderast.github.io/gradual_shiny/
• Another Intro to Shiny book: https://ourcodingclub.github.io/2017/03/07/shiny.html
• Video on the basics of web development: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXqTHsPaY0A
• Shiny basics: https://shiny.rstudio.com/articles/basics.html
• More Shiny basics: https://deanattali.com/blog/building-shiny-apps-tutorial/ (Dean Attali, the author of this tutorial is one of my clients)
• Articles on Shiny: https://shiny.rstudio.com/articles/

Build your own Shiny app and put it on GitHub!

Full Books on Shiny

• Mastering Shiny: https://github.com/hadley/mastering-shiny
• Engineering Production-Grade Shiny Apps: https://thinkr-open.github.io/building-shiny-apps-workflow/index.html