R Graphics Cookbook

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