Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology
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:
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:
R Programming for Data Science
R Markdown: The Definitive Guide
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
Engineering Production-Grade Shiny Apps
Outstanding User Interfaces with Shiny
Happy Git and GitHub for the useR
Outstanding User Interfaces with Shiny
Engineering Production-Grade Shiny Apps
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.
It has been a while since I scribbled anything on here but I now have a few things to relating, starting with this one. Amazon now promotes a different app for use when reading its eBooks on PC’s and, with a certain reluctance, I have taken to using this because its page synchronisation is not as good as it should be.
Another irritation is that it does not open in a maximised window and it scarcely remembers your size settings from session to session. Finding solutions to this sizing issue is no easy task so I happened on one of my own that I previously used with Windows (or File) Explorer folder shortcuts.
The first step is to find the actual location of the Start Menu shortcut. Trying C:\Users\[User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Amazon\Amazon Kindle should do that.
Next, right click on the Kindle icon and choose Properties from the context menu that appears. In the dialogue box that causes to appear on the screen, look for the “Run:” setting. By default, this appears as “Normal Window” but you can change this to “Maximised”, which is what I did before clicking on Apply before doing the same for the OK button to dismiss the dialogue box.
If you have pinned the shortcut to the taskbar or elsewhere, you may need to unpin it and pin it again to carry over the change. After that, I found that the Kindle app opened up in a maximised window as I wanted.
With that done, I could get along better with the app and it does put a search box in a more obvious place that it was in the old one. You also can set up Collections so your books are organised so there is something new for a user. Other than that, it largely works as before though you may to hit the F5 key every now and again to synchronise reading progress across multiple devices.
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.
The time to renew my .Net magazine came around and I decided to go for the digital option this time. The main attraction is that new issues come along without their cluttering up my house afterwards. After all, I do get to wondering how much space would be taken up by photos and music if those respective fields hadn’t gone down the digital route. Some may decry the non-printing of photos that reside on hard disks or equivalent electronic storage media but they certainly take up less physical space like that. Of course, ensuring that they are backed up in case of a calamity then becomes an important concern.
As well as the cost of a weekly magazine that I didn’t read as much as I should, it was concerns about space that drove me to go the electronic route with New Scientist a few years back. They were early days for digital magazine publishing and felt like it too. Eventually, I weened myself from NS and the move to digital helped. Maybe trying to view magazine articles on a 17″ screen wasn’t as good an experience as seeing them on the 24″ one that I possess these days.
That bigger screen has come in very handy for Zinio‘s Adobe AIR application for viewing issues of .Net and any other magazine that I happen to get from them. There’s quite a selection on there and it’s not limited to periodicals from Future Media either. Other titles include The Economist, Amateur Photographer, Countryfile, What Car and the aforementioned New Scientist also. That’s just a sample of eclectic selection that is on offer.
For some reason, Future seem to wait a few days for the paper versions of their magazines to arrive in shops before the digital ones become available. To me, this seems odd given that you’d expect the magazines to exist on computer systems before they come off the presses. Not only that but subscribers to the print editions get them before they reach the shops at all anyway. This is the sort of behaviour that makes you wonder if someone somewhere is attempting to preserve print media.
In contrast, Scientific American get this right by making PDF’s of their magazines available earlier than print editions. Given that it takes time for an American magazine to reach the U.K. and Eire, this is a very good thing. There was a time when I was a subscriber to this magazine and I found it infuriating to see the latest issues on newsagent shelves and I still waiting for mine to arrive in the post. It was enough to make me vow not to become a subscriber to anything that left me in this situation every month.
Some won’t pass on any savings with their digital editions. Haymarket Publishing come to mind here for What Car but they aren’t alone. Cicerone, Cumbrian publishers of excellent guidebooks for those seeking to enjoy the outdoors, do exactly the same with their wares so you really want to save on space and gain extra convenience when going digital with either of these. In this respect, the publishers of Amateur Photographer have got it right with a great deal for a year’s digital subscription. New Scientist did the same in those early days when I dabbled in digital magazines.
Of course, there are some who dislike reading things on a screen and digital publishing will need to lure those too if it is to succeed. Nevertheless, we now have tablet computers and eBook readers such as Amazon’s Kindle are taking hold too. Reading things on these should feel more natural than on a vertical desktop monitor or even a laptop screen.
Nevertheless, there are some magazines that even I would like to enjoy in print as opposed to on a screen. These also are the ones that I like to retain for future consultation too. Examples include Outdoor Photography and TGO and it is the content that drives my thinking here. The photographic reproduction in the former probably is best reserved for print while the latter is more interesting. TGO does do its own digital edition but the recounting of enjoyment of the outdoors surpassed presentation until a few months ago. It is the quality of the writing that makes me want to have them on a shelf as opposed to being stored on a computer disk.
The above thought makes me wonder why I’d go for digital magazines in preference to their print counterparts. Thinking about it now, I am so sure that there is a clear cut answer. Saving money and not having clutter does a have a lot to to with it but there is a sense that keeping copies .Net is less essential to me though I do enjoy seeing what is happening in the world of web design and am open to any new ideas too. Maybe the digital magazine scene is still an experiment for me.
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.
Last weekend, I ended up doing a spot of file structure reorganisation on the web server for my Assorted Explorations website and needed to correct some file pointers in entries on my outdoors blog. Rather than grabbing a plugin from somewhere, I decided to edit the posts table directly. First, I needed to select the affected observations and this is where I had to pick out the affected rows and edit them in MySQL Query Browser. To accomplish that, I needed basic string searching so I opened up my MySQL e-book from Apress and constructed something like the following:
select * from posts_table where post_text like '%some_text%';
The % wildcard characters are required to pick out a search string in any part of a piece of text. There may be a more sophisticated method, but this did what I needed in a quick and dirty manner without further ado. Well, it was what I needed.