Raghavan Madabusi combines Zeppelin, R, and Spark to perform crime analysis:
Apache Zeppelin, a web-based notebook, enables interactive data analytics including Data Ingestion, Data Discovery, and Data Visualization all in one place. Zeppelin interpreter concept allows any language/data-processing-backend to be plugged into Zeppelin. Currently, Zeppelin supports many interpreters such as Spark (Scala, Python, R, SparkSQL), Hive, JDBC, and others. Zeppelin can be configured with existing Spark eco-system and share SparkContext across Scala, Python, and R.
This links to a rather long post on how to set up and use all of these pieces. I’m more familiar with Jupyter than Zeppelin, but regardless of the notebook you choose, this is a good exercise to become familiar with the process.