1.5 Prerequisites

Before we continue, make sure you have all the software you need for this book:

• R: If you don’t have R installed already, you may be reading the wrong book; I assume a basic familiarity with R throughout this book. If you’d like to learn how to use R, I’d recommend my R for Data Science which is designed to get you up and running with R with a minimum of fuss.

• RStudio: RStudio is a free and open source integrated development environment (IDE) for R. While you can write and use Shiny apps with any R environment (including R GUI and ESS), RStudio has some nice features specifically for authoring, debugging, and deploying Shiny apps. We recommend giving it a try, but it’s not required to be successful with Shiny or with this book. You can download RStudio Desktop from https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download

• R packages: This book uses a bunch of R packages. You can install them all at once by running:

  install.packages(c(
    "directlabels", "dplyr", "gameofthrones", "ggforce", "gghighlight", 
    "ggnewscale", "ggplot2", "ggrepel", "ggtext", "ggthemes", "hexbin", 
    "mapproj", "maps", "munsell", "ozmaps", "paletteer", "patchwork", 
    "rmapshaper", "scico", "sf", "stars", "tidyr", "wesanderson" 
  ))