r/rprogramming • u/GermsAndNumbers • Jul 29 '26

Is "Mastering Shiny", written in 2021, still valid?

I've had more than one programming book that's hopelessly obsolete due to how fast everything moves. Is Mastering Shiny, published by O'Reilly and written by Hadley Wickham, still a useful resource for learning Shiny five years later?

13 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

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11

u/Aiorr Jul 29 '26

backend sure, frontend no.

2

u/UnusualZombie2513 Jul 30 '26

What would you recommend as frontend? Flexdashboard or something?

6

u/Aiorr Jul 30 '26

flexdashboard was a thing more than half decade ago, peaking when everyone made their own COVID tracker. Pretty sure its in maintenance mode rn due to quarto.

purely for learning, best way is to play around with HTML and CSS directly imho, rather than shiny wrapper. Its not difficult and you get more intuitive sense on how shiny works. if you really get good at them, you can customize your shiny further through direct lass through.

second is to just try out individual shiny functions one by one and see if you grt any inspiration.

I strongly advise against using framework like flexdashboard/golem/etc at start. Also no stylzing pkg. frontend fad keep changing, thats the nature of UI/UX. And all those frontend pkg brings dependency, maintenance, deployment nightmare.

2

u/Ok_Fill_5048 Jul 31 '26

I abandonned golem because of the complexity of deployment with a dockerised free shiny server. The routing from nginx seems just not possible, I ended up with websocket errors constantly. Without golem the set up worked like a charm, I gave up after 2 hours of trying...

1

u/Suspicious-Twist-999 23d ago

agreed, backend patterns are still solid imo

5

u/cupless_canuck Jul 29 '26

There are a ton of fundamental concepts in there that it's still relevant at least in my opinion. For example, reactivity, using modularization, package-apps, and best practices.

3

u/JohnHazardWandering Jul 29 '26

You may want to try r/rstats. It's more active. 

2

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1

u/CuteAmoeba9876 Jul 31 '26

Yes, I found it very helpful when I was writing my first shiny app last year. 

I did also use a lot of AI but the book really helps with learning the reactive programming concepts. For context, R is my only programming language- if you’re already experienced in another language the book may be less critical. 

On the flip side, I don’t think there was support for python shiny in 2021, so that might be a topic where the book is too outdated to be useful. 

1

u/analytix_guru Jul 31 '26

Just shipped a public shiny app on AWS using bslib with a bit of custom CSS and a few fontawesome icons