Introduction

This chapter is specifically kept towards the end as you need to have a good understanding of R and its packages to be able to work through it. My aim behind writing this chapter is to introduce users of R to the concept of interactivity and animation, ways to combine plots, develop a good understanding of API and XML technologies, and how they could be used to better enhance our visualizations.

We will learn how to generate powerful and meaningful presentations using the slidify package. We will also learn to create web applications and animation in R using the shiny and googleVis packages. Finally, we learn about API and XML and how they can be effectively used to scrap data from the Web and generate meaningful visualizations. You might find recipes in this chapter a bit more complex, but you might be able to deepen your knowledge of the concepts using the references mentioned under the See also section in each recipe.