One of the heart touching R packages that I noted in rstudio::global(2021), 24-hour virtual conference was flipbookr package developed by Gina Reynolds, Garrick Aden-Buie and Emi Tanaka. Using flipbookr package you can present your code step-by-step and side-by-side with its output.
This incremental code-output evolution is really helpful to learn how the output changes step-by-step when adding R codes one by one.
How do we create a flipbook?
First install the package from GitHub.
Writing a book is now an amazing experience using R open source software. The R package, bookdown, developed by Yihui Xie, generates printer-ready books and ebooks from R Markdown documents. This package produces books in all output forms (PDF, HTML, ePub, LaTeX, Word and Kindle books etc.). We can also add dynamic graphics and interactive applications (HTML widgets and Shiny apps) to books, and further the package supports a wide range of languages (R, C/C++, Python, Fortran, Julia, Shell scripts, and SQL, etc).
Creating a dashboard is an attractive way to visualize different groups of related data. To setup a dashboard we can use the R package flexdashboard.
First, setup the orientation of the dashboard in YML header. The default orientation is columns, which shows individual charts stacked vertically within each column. To setup the orientation row-wise specify orientation: rows option in YML header.
Similarly, we can display several components in different windows using a tabset.
R or Jupyter Notebook?
Although I am a fan of R, RStudio and R Notebook, some researchers are familiar with Jupyter Notebook. Specially, those who work in industry may love to use Jupyter Notebook. Jupyter Notebook is a web application in which you can create and share documents that contain live codes, equations, text and also graphical visualizations. Therefore, we can use Jupyter Notebook to perform data analysis in real time.
