Learning R

Appendix B. Other Things to Do in R

There are lots of things that R can do that didn’t make it into this book, either because they are niche requirements, because they’re too advanced, or because there are really good books out there already dealing with those topics. This appendix is intended to point you in the direction of further resources. Several of the subjects covered here are dealt with in more detail in the CRAN Task Views, which are well worth browsing.

You can make GUIs for your R code to help less technical users. The gWidgets framework allows high-level access to several graphics toolkits, including tcl/tk, qt, GTK2, and HTML. (Low-level access is also possible via tcltk/tcltk2, qtbase, RGtk2, and several HTML-generation packages.) Read Programming Graphical User Interfaces in R by Michael Lawrence and John Verzani for more information. The Java-based Deducer package provides an alternative, and RStudio’s shiny package makes it simple to make web apps with R.

You can call code in compiled languages (C, C++, and FORTRAN) via the .Call function. By far the easiest way of using these languages is to write C++ in conjunction with the Rcpp package. Read Seamless R and C++ Integration with Rcpp by Dirk Eddelbuettel for more on this subject.

R is single threaded, but there are several ways of making it use multiple cores or multiple machines to parallelize your code. The parallel package ships with R, and under POSIX-compliant operating systems (that’s most OSs that aren’t Windows) ...