by Joseph Rickert

The 2017 R Conference season will get off to an early start on January 13th and 14th with RStudio::Conf 2017 in Orlando, Florida. The schedule promises an intense but collegial experience with plenty of hands-on practice working with R and the RStudio tool chain of packages and products. To prepare for the conference, I thought I would try to extract the major themes from the list of talks and workshops and point out some resources to study ahead of time. Even if you are not going to the conference, you may find these themes and resources helpful in improving your R experience.

The first big theme might be described as R for Data Science. Conference talks will take you through operational issues using GitHub and working with databases, text mining with the Tidyverse of data acquisition, manipulation and exploration packages, writing readable code with pipes, functional programming using purrr, profiling code performance with the RStudio IDE, writing high performance code with Rcpp, and running on Spark clusters with sparklyr.

A second prominent theme is about leveraging the reach, interactivity and visualization potential of the web from R. Talks will describe new Shiny capabilities like bookmarking Shiny State and dynamic user interfaces. There will also be presentations on htmlwidgets, mapping with Leaflet, interactive plotting with rbokeh, and using web APIs from R.

The third big theme comprises talks about using Shiny and RMarkdown to facilitate reproducible research and publishing. Speakers will describe RStudio Connect, a new enterprise platform for “push-button” publishing of your team’s Shiny apps, RMarkdown documents, notebooks and plots. There will be a tutorial on advanced RMarkdown features and talks on using RMarkdown to make dashboards and web applications, extending and customizing RMarkdown and on R Notebook workflows and techniques.

This will be our final R Views post of the year. Our first post of 2017 is planned for January 4th. We are very thankful for your readership, and we will go into the new year with the mission to expand our coverage of all things interesting to the R Community. If you have something you would like to contribute pleased write to me at [email protected]. We welcome contributions from guest bloggers and the possibility of giving voice to diverse views from the Community.

On behalf of all of RStudio we wish you: Happy Holidays and a bright and prosperous New Year!