Table of Contents

1. Why interactive data visualization? 2. The plotly for R ecosystem. 3. The plot_ly() toolbox. 4. Plotly extension packages.

About the Author

Carson Sievert is the author and maintainer of the plotly R package, a recipient of the American Statistical Association’s 2017 John Chambers award, and Program Chair of the Section on Statistical Graphics. After receiving a PhD in statistics from Iowa State, Carson joined RStudio as a software engineer to work on software that bridges R and web technologies such as shiny, plotly, and rmarkdown.

Reviews

"Plotly is the most-downloaded interactive graphics system for R, and this book should help all plotly users—both new and experienced—understand more about plotly graphics. With this in mind, I feel that this book (once it makes its way to a final form) will have a wide appeal for a large swath of R users. This audience will include both statisticians and data scientists, and a wide range of education and experience levels, ranging from the novice student to the seasoned data scientist to the statistics faculty member…I suspect a book on plotly will be wildly successful."
~Adam Loy, Carleton College"This book is well-written and well-structured. The potential readership of this book is those who would like to learn or master interactive data visualization with R, and I’m not aware of any competing books in this regard. Both novice R users and experts could find this book useful and learn about plotly more systematically. Data practitioners could obtain lots of practical advice on how to make their plotly applications more responsive and more aesthetically appealing. I would also recommend this book as the textbook for courses that focus on data visualisation using web technology."
~Earo Wang, Monash University"This book fills a gap in the currently-available texts, providing information on making interactive graphics in R. I recently taught a course entitled ‘Advanced Statistical Software,’ and found it difficult to locate resources on plot.ly and shiny. As far as I know, this is the first book to really cover these topics. As with many other books published by Chapman and Hall, the availability of the website version of the book is extremely useful for the R community. I have already used materials from the web version, but if I were to teach this course again I would consider making the paper book a required text…Because Dr. Sievert wrote the plotly R package, he is clearly the world expert in the material. He also brings a wealth of general visualization knowledge to the book, which is full of rich references to other materials."
~Amelia McNamara, University of St. Thomas"This text would be an excellent resource for an advanced (graduate level) data visualization course. I think it could also be very valuable in data journalism coursework, where interactivity is a powerful communication tool. The book is very clearly written, and there are plenty of examples to demonstrate the tools to the reader…I especially enjoyed that the author provides the reader with a link to an RStudio cloud environment with which to run all of the examples in the book on their own. I believe this is an essential piece to this and any other modern computing text."
~Sam Tyner"Some sections of this book will be very useful for two classes I teach. One is introduction to data science where I teach about JSON and HTML data and how to display them. The second course is a data visualization course where I teach interactive visualization…Currently, I am recommending several books. This book will certainly be an addition, in the sense that it provides detailed materials on interactive visualization."
~Mahbubul Majumder, University of Nebraska

"Plotly is the most-downloaded interactive graphics system for R, and this book should help all plotly users—both new and experienced—understand more about plotly graphics. With this in mind, I feel that this book (once it makes its way to a final form) will have a wide appeal for a large swath of R users. This audience will include both statisticians and data scientists, and a wide range of education and experience levels, ranging from the novice student to the seasoned data scientist to the statistics faculty member…I suspect a book on plotly will be wildly successful."
~Adam Loy, Carleton College"This book is well-written and well-structured. The potential readership of this book is those who would like to learn or master interactive data visualization with R, and I’m not aware of any competing books in this regard. Both novice R users and experts could find this book useful and learn about plotly more systematically. Data practitioners could obtain lots of practical advice on how to make their plotly applications more responsive and more aesthetically appealing. I would also recommend this book as the textbook for courses that focus on data visualisation using web technology."
~Earo Wang, Monash University"This book fills a gap in the currently-available texts, providing information on making interactive graphics in R. I recently taught a course entitled ‘Advanced Statistical Software,’ and found it difficult to locate resources on plot.ly and shiny. As far as I know, this is the first book to really cover these topics. As with many other books published by Chapman and Hall, the availability of the website version of the book is extremely useful for the R community. I have already used materials from the web version, but if I were to teach this course again I would consider making the paper book a required text…Because Dr. Sievert wrote the plotly R package, he is clearly the world expert in the material. He also brings a wealth of general visualization knowledge to the book, which is full of rich references to other materials."
~Amelia McNamara, University of St. Thomas"This text would be an excellent resource for an advanced (graduate level) data visualization course. I think it could also be very valuable in data journalism coursework, where interactivity is a powerful communication tool. The book is very clearly written, and there are plenty of examples to demonstrate the tools to the reader…I especially enjoyed that the author provides the reader with a link to an RStudio cloud environment with which to run all of the examples in the book on their own. I believe this is an essential piece to this and any other modern computing text."
~Sam Tyner"Some sections of this book will be very useful for two classes I teach. One is introduction to data science where I teach about JSON and HTML data and how to display them. The second course is a data visualization course where I teach interactive visualization…Currently, I am recommending several books. This book will certainly be an addition, in the sense that it provides detailed materials on interactive visualization."
~Mahbubul Majumder, University of Nebraska