Reactive Web Dashboards with Shiny Transcripts
Chapter: Welcome to the course
Lecture: Course website orientation
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We learned to write some basic Shiny applications, and I wanted to take this
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opportunity to walk through the course website and show you how to do the exercises that are
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a really important part of cementing this kind of understanding that you've learned in the lectures.
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So here's the Shiny for Python workshop, and you see they have these exercises which more or less
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map the divisions in the Talk Python course. And when you open up one of these exercise pages,
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it'll load a little bit, spend a little bit of time loading the exercise pane. But what it'll
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give you is a bunch of different exercises that either reinforce some core concept of the course,
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or test, give you an example of a failure state that you might find yourself in when you're
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building your Shiny apps in your day-to-day life. So each of these is organized the same way. There's
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four tabs. There's goal, problem, and solution. And the goal will show you the working Shiny
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application. So this first one is really simple. It's just ""hello world,"" but down here, you know,
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we have a data frame. Further down, we have some selectors and things like that. So this is showing
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you the goal, what you're trying to do with this application. And then on the problem tab,
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you have a little editor that you can use. So I can go ahead and type something in here,
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and it will allow me to click this play button to run the application. And you can see, like,
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do we want to have, you know, we can compare the application that we wrote to the goal to just say,
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okay, what am I trying to do here?"" And if we get stuck or just want to confirm that you got the
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same answer that I got when I was writing the course, you can click the solution tab and see
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what the real solution is. If your implementation doesn't look identical to mine, that's fine. More
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or less, what you're trying to do is get an application that looks and feels and works the
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same way that the goal application does. If you'd like to do these locally in VS Code or another
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editor, you can go to the GitHub source. And this will also have ReadMe, which gives you the prompt
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for the problem, an app.py file, which shows you the problem, and then this app solution.py file,
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which shows you the solution. So again, you can look at the app. If you get stuck, you can go to
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the solution. Each of these exercises is pretty short, shouldn't take very long, and it's really
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important to do every single one of them. We've taught this course a number of times, and the
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consistent feedback that we've gotten from people is that the thing that they learned the most from
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was going and doing the exercises. And that's true for my personal experience kind of learning this
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or any other type of programming. You kind of listen to somebody talk about a framework, and you
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kind of get it. But then when you actually try to implement something, you realize that, oh, I need
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to look at the documentation again, or I didn't, I was tuning out for that piece of content. So
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these exercises are really minimal. So there isn't a lot of duplication or fluff. And so I'd encourage
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you to do all of them. And this first one has a lot of cases, a lot of simple ones. And then as
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they get further along, there's fewer of them to just test the kind of main single concept of that
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section. So give them a try and I hope you like them.