Hadley Wickham recently released an online version of Mastering Shiny. The book is great! If you haven’t read it, do it fast! On a side note, it is really amazing how much of good and curated content you can get for free in R. When I started programming back in 2007, the first step was buying a brand new – and sometimes expensive – book about the language. There were blogs and other sites, but most content was very basic and not curated, meaning that the posted code most of the time did not work.
In this post I’ll share my experience in setting up my own virtual server for hosting shiny applications in Digital Ocean. First, context. I’m working in a academic project where we build a package for accessing financial data and corporate events directly from B3, the Brazilian financial exchange. The objective is to set a reproducible standard and facilite data acquisition of a large, and very interesting, dataset. The result is GetDFPData. Since many researchers and students in Brazil are not knowledgeable in R, we needed to make it easier for people to use the software.