Technology Tales

Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology

Some books and other forms of documentation on R

11th September 2021

The thrust of an exhortation from a computing handbook publisher comes to mind here: don’t just look things up on Google, read a book so you really understand what you are doing. Something like those words was used to sell an eBook on Github but the same sentiment applies to R or any other computing language. Using a search engine will get you going or add to existing knowledge but only a book or a training course will help to embed real competence.

In the case of R, there is a myriad of blogs out there that can be consulted as well as function and package documentation on RDocumentation or rrdr.io. For the former, R-bloggers or R Weekly can make good places to start while ones like Stats and R, Statistics Globe, STHDA, PSI’s VIS-SIG and anything from Posit (including their main blog as well as their AI one) can be worth consulting. Additionally, there is also RStudio Education and the NHS-R Community, which also have a Github repository together with a YouTube channel. Many packages have dedicated websites as well so there is no lack of documentation with all of these so here is a selection:

Tidyverse

forcats

tidyr

Distill for R Markdown

Databases using R

RMariaDB

R Markdown

xaringanExtra

Shiny

formattable

reactable

DT

rhandsontable

thematic

bslib

plumber

ggforce

officeverse

officer

pharmaRTF

COVID-19 Data Hub

To come to the real subject of this post, R is unusual in that books that you can buy also have companions websites that contain the same content with the same structure. Whatever funds this approach (and some appear to be supported by RStudio itself by the looks of things), there certainly are a lot of books available freely online in HTML as you will see from the list below while a few do not have a print counterpart as far as I know:

Big Book of R

R Programming for Data Science

Hands-On Programming with R

Advanced R

Cookbook for R

R Graphics Cookbook

R Markdown: The Definitive Guide

R Markdown Cookbook

RMarkdown for Scientists

bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown

blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown

pagedown: Create Paged HTML Documents for Printing from R Markdown

Dynamic Documents with R and knitr

Mastering Shiny

Engineering Production-Grade Shiny Apps

Outstanding User Interfaces with Shiny

R Packages

Mastering Spark with R

Happy Git and GitHub for the useR

JavaScript for R

HTTP Testing in R

Outstanding User Interfaces with Shiny

Engineering Production-Grade Shiny Apps

The Shiny AWS Book

Many of the above have counterparts published by O’Reilly or Chapman & Hall, to name the two publishers that I have found so far. Aside from sharing these with you, there is also the personal motivation of having the collection of links somewhere so I can close tabs in my Firefox session. There are other web articles open in other tabs that I need to retain and share but these will need to do for now and I hope that you find them as useful as I do.

Thoughts on eBooks

20th August 2016

In recent months, I have been doing a clear out of paper books in case the recent European Union referendum result in the U.K. affects my ability to stay there since I am an Irish citizen. In my two decades here, I have not felt as much uncertainty and lack of belonging as I do now. It is as if life wants to become difficult for a while.

What made the clearance easier was that there was of making sure that the books were re-used and eBooks replaced anything that I would wanted to keep. However, what I had not realised is that demand for eBooks has flatlined, something that only became apparent in recent article in PC Pro article penned by Stuart Turton. He had all sorts of suggestions about how to liven up the medium but I have some of my own.

Niall Benvie also broached the subject from the point of view of photographic display in an article for Outdoor Photography because most are looking at photos on their smartphones and that often reduces the quality of what they see. Having a partiality to photo books, it remains the one class of books that I am more likely to have in paper form, even I have an Apple iPad Pro (the original 12.9 inch version) and am using it to write these very words. There also is the six year old 24 inch Iiyama screen that I use with my home PC.

The two apps with which I have had experience are Google Play Books and Amazon Kindle, both of which I have used on both iOS and Android while I use the Windows app for the latter too. Both apps are simple and work effectively until you end up with something of a collection. Then, shortcomings become apparent.

Search functionality is something that can be hidden away on menus and that is why I missed it for so long. For example, Amazon’s Kindle supports puts the search box in a prominent place on iOS but hides the same function in menus on its Android or Windows incarnations. Google Play Books consistently does the latter from what I have seen and it would do no harm to have a search box on the library screen since menus and touchscreen devices do not mix as well. The ability to search within a book is similarly afflicted so this also needs moving to a more prominent place and is really handy for guidebooks or other more technical textbooks.

The ability to organise a collection appears to be another missed opportunity. The closest that I have seen so far are the Cloud and Device screens on Amazon’s Kindle app but even this is not ideal. Having the ability to select some books as favourites would help as would hiding others from the library screen would be an improvement. Having the ability to re-sell unwanted eBooks would be another worthwhile addition because you do just that with paper books.

When I started on this piece, I reached the conclusion the eBooks too closely mimicked libraries of paper books. Now, I am not so sure. It appears to me that the format is failing to take full advantage of its digital form and that might have been what Turton was trying to evoke but the examples that he used did not appeal to me. Also, we could do with more organisation functionality in apps and the ability to resell could be another opportunity. Instead, we appear to be getting digital libraries and there are times when a personal collection is best.

All the while, paper books are being packaged in ever more attractive ways and there always will be some that look better in paper form than in digital formats and that still applies to those with glossy appealing photos. Paper books almost feel like gift items these days and you cannot fault the ability to browse them by flicking through the pages with your hands.

Deauthorising Adobe Digital Editions software

12th March 2011

My being partial to the occasional eBook has meant my encountering Adobe’s Digital Editions. While I wonder why the functionality cannot be be included in the already quite bulky Adobe Reader, it does exist and some publishers used it to ensure that their books are not as easily pirated. In my case, it is a certain publisher of walking guidebooks that uses it and I must admit to being a sometime fan of their wares. At first, I was left wondering how they thought that Digital Editions was the delivery means that would ensure that they do not lose out from sharing of copies of eBooks but a recent episode has me seeing what they see.

One of the nice things that it allows is the sharing of eBooks between different computers using your Adobe account. Due to my own disorganisation, I admit to having more than one though I am not entirely sure why I ended up doing that. The result was that I ended entering the wrong credentials intro the Digital Editions instance on my Toshiba laptop and I needed to get rid of them in order to enter the correct ones. It is when you try doing things like this that you come to realise how basic and slimmed down this software is. After a Google search, I encountered the very keyboard shortcut about which even the help didn’t seem to want to tell me: Control+Shift+D. That did the required deauthorisation for me to be able to read eBooks bought and downloaded onto another computer. Maybe Digital Editions does its job to lessen the chances after all. Of course, I cannot see the system being perfect or unbreakable but a lot of our security is there to deter the opportunists rather than the more determined.

O’Reilly does eBooks…

12th February 2008

I have been a Safari subscriber for a while now and access to O’Reilly titles has been the main reason behind it. However, I recently discovered that O’Reilly is offering full eBooks of some of its titles. Why the offering is far from complete, this is progress and the prospect of donloading complete books with proper page numbering and an index is an appealing. Previously, I was downloading the individual chapters from Safari and compiling the books in that way, a less than user friendly approach. So, do I continue the Safari subscription or not?

SAS books now on Safari

31st May 2007

Being a Safari subscriber, I found a pleasant surprise awaiting me in this month’s email newsletter: eBooks from SAS Books are now available on Safari. Having a quick look, I found a small but useful selection. Topics like the SQL procedure, the Macro language and Enterprise Guide caught my eye but there’s more than this on offer. It’ll be interesting to see where this leads…

The joys of eBooks

3rd April 2007

One of the nice things about eBooks is the saving that you can make on buying one instead of the dead tree edition. And if you get one from Apress, it is the full article that you get and they keep it available so that you can download another version if you need it. You can also print the thing off if you want too but a laser printer producing double-sided prints is an asset if you don’t want your space invaded by a hoard of lever arch binders. Having a copious supply of inexpensive toner helps too as does cheap paper. Otherwise, you could spend your savings on printing the thing yourself.

The ever pervasive Safari does things a little differently from the likes of Apress. Mind you, the emphasis there is on the library aspect of the operation and not eBook selling. The result is that you can only ever download chapters, so no index or overall table of contents. You still can buy all of the chapters for a particular book, though some publishers don’t seem to allow this for some reason, but finding anything in there after you have had a read becomes an issue, especially when it’s the hard copy that you are using. Take yesterday, for instance, when trying to relocate the formatting parameters for the UNIX date function. I eventually found them in the chapters of UNIX in a Nutshell that I have downloaded and printed off but I spent rather longer looking in Learning the Korn Shell than I should have done. I know that you can search in the PDF’s themselves but that is more laborious when there is a number of files to search rather than just the one. I suppose that the likes of O’Reilly prefers you to buy paper copies of its books for more extensive use, and they have a point, but having the electronic version all in one file does make life so much easier.

Photoshop CS2 workout

8th March 2007

Adobe Photoshop CS2

I am in the process of adding new photos to my online photo gallery at the moment and the exercise is giving my Photoshop CS2 trial version a good amount of use. And the experience also adding a few strings to my bow in graphics editing terms, something that is being helped along by the useful volume that is The Focal Easy Guide to Photoshop CS2.

The most significant change that has happened is that to my workflow. Previously, it took the following form:

  • Acquire image from scanner/camera
  • For a camera image, do some exposure compensation
  • Create copy of image in software’s own native file format (PSPIMAGE/PSP for Paint Shop Pro and PSD/PSB for Photoshop)
  • Clean up image with clone stamp tool: removes scanner artefacts or sensor dust from camera images; I really must get my EOS 10D cleaned (the forecast for the coming weekend is hardly brilliant to I might try sending it away).
  • Save a new version of the image following clean-up.
  • Reduce the size of the digital camera image to 600×400 and create a new file.
  • Boost colours of original image with hue/saturation/lightness control; save new version of file.
  • Sharpen the image and save another version.
  • For web images, save a new file with a descriptive name
  • Create JPEG version
  • Copy JPEG to Apache web server folders
  • Create thumbnail from original JPEG

The new workflow is based upon this:

  • Acquire image from scanner/camera
  • For a camera image, do some exposure compensation; there is a lot of pre-processing that you can do in Camera Raw
  • Create copy of image in software’s own native file format
  • Clean up the image with the clone stamp tool and create a new file with _cleaned as its filename suffix. I tried the spot healing brush but didn’t seem to have that much success with it. Maybe I need to try again…
  • Add adjustment layer for level correction and save file with _level suffix in its name.
  • Add adjustment layer for curves correction
  • Add adjustment layer for boosting colours with hue/saturation/lightness control
  • Flatten layers and save new image with _flatten suffix in its name
  • Sharpen flattened image and create a new version with _sharpened suffix in its name
  • For web images, save a new file with a descriptive name
  • Create JPEG versions in Apache web server folders; carry out any resizing using bi-cubic sharpening at this point.

Some improvements remain. For instance, separation of raw, intermediate and final photos by storing them in different directories is perhaps one possibility that I should consider. But there are other editing tricks that I have yet to use as well: merged and blended layers. Bi-cubic smoothing for expanding images is another possibility but it is one that requires a certain amount of caution. And I am certain that I will encounter others as I make my way through my reading.

Photoshop books

28th February 2007

Having exhausted the trial time on PhotoShop Elements 5, I am now having a look at its big brother PhotoShop CS2. That has got me thinking about PhotoShop books so that I become more of the possibilities and how to use them. Having a Safari subscription as I do, that naturally became my first port of call and I seemed to find two that answered my needs. Both are by Scott Kelby and they now lie on my Safari bookshelf: The Photoshop Elements 5 Book for Digital Photographers and The Photoshop CS2 Book for Digital Photographers. Even so, I am tempted to get a dead tree version of one of them and that presents a chicken and egg dilemma: the books could help choose which software to buy and the software dictates which of them will be the more useful. That said, I suspect price and features will swing it the way of Elements 5; paying over £400 for software whose capabilities I may never need does not sound financially sensible.

Update March 5th, 2007: I have now got my mits on the dead tree edition of Scott Kelby’s The Photoshop Elements 5 Book for Digital Photographers as well as Brad Hinkel’s Focal Easy Guide to Photoshop CS2. Now for some reading…

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