Building Interactive Graphs with ggplot2 and Shiny

Some time ago, I was contacted from guys at Packt Publishing. Their just published the Building Interactive Graphs with ggplot2 and Shiny online course and they ask me my (humble) opinion.

I am proud of their request, and I will review shortly here the Building Interactive Graphs with ggplot2 and Shiny online course. I’ll publish a more in-depth review at the begin of September, when Italian R users come back from vacation. In this post, I will provide a description of the course. In the future post, I will highlight what was new for me and I will share an example of what I learned from this useful course.

I discovered the online course some days before I was contacted by Packt’s team. The course sounds interesting to me because I was working on a project involving ggplot2 and Shiny. Moreover, I find an online course more effective and useful than a printed book. This is obviously, since I work for a company providing on line (and on site, too) R courses.

As the author says on his website:

The course consists of short videos (around 2 or 3 minutes) that explain one concept at the time. Each video comes with the relevant code, and pointers to go further in your own time.

About the target of this video, I agree with Arthur’s review:

I highly recommend it to a very wide audience, from students beginning data science or statistics to mature data analysts or even seasoned enterprise business intelligence professionals.

Course length is about 90 minutes, so you can watch it during the favorite serial of your wife (Italian TV networks usually broadcasts two episodes at time) or the unmissable soccer match of your husband.

The course consists of 40 short videos, grouped in eight sections. You can find the course outline, at the official website of the video course. If you never bought a course from Packt Publishing, you can download the whole course in a single zip file. Once you downloaded and uncompressed the zip file, you have to open the index.html page with your favorite browser. A pleasant (off line) web site, will direct you to the video of your interest. You can watch the course head to tail, but its structure allows you to watch immediately the topics you need now and postpone the others. Alternatively, you can watch each video online, even in your internet connected TV. The third link allows you to download the code. You’ll download presentations too, but they were not very useful for me.

As you can see from my posts, I am not very able with English language.
By the way, I found the British English of the author easy to understand to non-native speaker too.

The first five sections focus on ggplot2, starting from installing and exploring several advanced topics, such as faceting, big data and plot customization. All that requires the first hours.

Section 6 and 7 show Shiny capabilities. Unlike first sections, in which each section covers a well defined subject, you can imagine this as an unique section about Shiny, made by ten short videos.

Finally, the last section shows how to put everything together.

If you already know both ggplot2 and Shiny, this course will not improve your capabilities in a relevant way. You can find something new, especially in the ggplot2 part. Anyway, you can find it a valuable review and its structure allows you to jump to videos of your interest. If you are new to R or if you are new to ggplot2 and/or Shiny you should buy this online course now. You will be productive in a short while.