Welcome to R minitutorials of R White Dwarf Since the beginning of this year I’ve been forced to abandon completely the blog for countless and rather abstract personal reasons that include personal health, family matters and changes in my daily activities including volunteer work as well as main job. As part of the last, I finally got hired for a position as R developer, which brings great joy to me.

I am happy and excited as I have just deployed my first shiny app on the web. You can find it running at shiny.rwhitedwarf.com (NOTE: I don’t have ssl certificate so, your browser might tell you that is not secure, but you can trust me that there’s no risk). I have created a few shiny apps in the past but I never deployed one, especially in an owned domain. The app can create a map of all cities listed in a table for a given country.

This post is part of our series on functions in R. You can see our previous post if you want to understand the basics but it is not strictly necessary. Here we will go into detail about for loops and if statements in R, two key elements of any function. We are going to define a process, map it in a step-by-step approach and wrape it in a function that can repeat it automatically.

Background This is the first post of R with White Dwarf and I decided to start this blog with a basic tutorial. There is already a lot of information in the web about getting started with R. With a simple google search you can easily find info on how to install it, how to use R studio or other text editor, learn about the basic functions and concepts, what is a vector, a data frame, how to use them, etc.