mages' blog

Building R packages is not particular hard, but it can be a bit of a daunting endeavour at the beginning, particularly if you are more of a statistician than a computer scientist or programmer.

Some concepts may appear foreign or like red tape, yet many of them evolved over time for a reason. They help to stay organise, collaborate more effectively with others and write better code.

So, here are my slides of the R package development workshop at Lancaster University.

R package development

For a detailed and authoritative reference on R package development see the Writing R Extensions manual on CRAN.

Following on from last week's post, here are my slides on using googleVis on shiny from the Advanced R workshop at Lancaster University, 21 May 2013.

googleVis on shiny

Again, I wrote my slides in RMarkdown and I used slidify to create the HTML5 presentation. Unfortunately you may have to reload the slides that use googleVis on shiny as the JavaScript code in the background is potentially not ideal. Any pointers, which could help to improve the performance will be much appreciated.

Many of the examples in my slides are taken from my post First steps of using googleVis on shiny, however the presentation also demonstrates that it is possible to inject JavaScript code into a googleVis chart to trigger a shiny event, see also the example below.

Last week I was invited to give an introduction to googleVis at Lancaster University. This time I decided to use the R package slidify for my talk. Slidify, like knitr, is built on Markdown and makes it very easy to create beautiful HTML5 presentations.

Introduction to googleVis

Separating content from layout is always a good idea. Markup languages such as TeX/LaTeX or HTML are built on this principle. Ramnath Vaidyanathan has done a fantastic job with slidify, as it is very straightforward to create presentations with R. There are a couple of advantages compared to traditional presentation software packages:

• RMarkdown helps me to focus on the content
• Integration of R code is build in
• HTML5 allows me to embed interactive content, such as
  
  • Videos
  • googleVis and other interactive charts
  • shiny apps (more on this next week)

In the past I have used knitr in combination with pandoc to generate a slidy presentation. However, with slidfiy I can do all this in R directly. And better, Ramnath provides me with a choice of different layout frameworks and syntax highlighting options. Finally to top it all, publishing the slides on Github was only one more R statement: publish('mages', 'Introduction_to_googleVis').

I will give a half-day tutorial on googleVis with Diego de Castillo at useR2013! in Albacete on 9 July 2013. I hope to see some of you there.