R Graphics Cookbook Author: Winston Chang | Language: English | ISBN:
1449316956 | Format: PDF
R Graphics Cookbook Description
This practical guide provides more than 150 recipes to help you generate high-quality graphs quickly, without having to comb through all the details of R’s graphing systems. Each recipe tackles a specific problem with a solution you can apply to your own project, and includes a discussion of how and why the recipe works.
Most of the recipes use the ggplot2 package, a powerful and flexible way to make graphs in R. If you have a basic understanding of the R language, you’re ready to get started.
- Use R’s default graphics for quick exploration of data
- Create a variety of bar graphs, line graphs, and scatter plots
- Summarize data distributions with histograms, density curves, box plots, and other examples
- Provide annotations to help viewers interpret data
- Control the overall appearance of graphics
- Render data groups alongside each other for easy comparison
- Use colors in plots
- Create network graphs, heat maps, and 3D scatter plots
- Structure data for graphing
- Paperback: 416 pages
- Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (January 3, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1449316956
- ISBN-13: 978-1449316952
- Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 0.9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Even if you know R, learning to do graphs well in R is like learning (yet another) new language - that of ggplot2.
You could learn a new language by first studying its grammar and building some vocabulary. In that case, you might want to start with ggplot2 creator's book
ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis (Use R!). That's an excellent book and that's where I started.
Still, there are many loose ends in my understanding of ggplot2 and sometimes I struggle to find the exact technique to achieve the effect I want. e.g. do I set fill or colour? What does grouping exactly do? How do I rearrange factors? How do I remove the legends and clean up the grid lines?
I am sure answers to all such questions could be found by googling and reading Hadley's original text carefully. However, the beauty of Winston Chang's book is that it has compiled tons of such examples in recipe format and is a huge time saver. Now this is my first stop reference, even before hitting google or stackoverflow.
Another advantage of the book is that all recipes are self contained and you could quickly pick up a technique or two in any 5 minute of break time. After immersing myself in enough examples during last week, I feel I am getting better hang of grammar of graphics (philosophy behind ggplot2).
By the way, if you have not read Hadley's book or tutorial, please read Appendix A before you dive in.
Even though I am really familiar with ggplot2, plyr and reshape, Winston Chang have some great tricks manipulating data and creating awesome graphics that I had never seen before. The recipe format of this book is great for beginners and advanced users because one can get straight answers without having to read too much.
By Felipe Carrillo
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