New Book Review: "R Graphics Cookbook"
New book review for R Graphics Cookbook, by Winston Chang, O'Reilly, 2012, reposted here:
This book is the third that I have recently used to get up to speed on the R language and environment. The other two texts include "R in a Nutshell" and "R in Action" (see my review). The main catalysts behind my decision to purchase another book on R was my need to get up to speed with using the language to create graphs, and that not only are plotting functions that come with base R not unified behind a common interface and set of options, there exist limitations with base R plotting functions. Of course, there are other plotting functions across the over 2500 packages that have become available to the community, but the ggplot2 package that is the focus of this book is well regarded and grown in use to become one of the most popular R packages since its release in 2005.
What Chang presents in this book is extremely practical. My recent pro bono work to move a client away from Microsoft Excel to this powerful open source platform and industry standard used for both small and big data analytics is partially testament to the usefulness of this book. While I have needed to peruse R package documentation as part of this work, it is not a stretch to say that a majority of what I needed was contained in this book, either as starting points or complete examples. The explanations are very well written and organized, and the fact that all of the pertinent graphs are in color was very helpful when it came time to understanding how ggplot2 can be used for tasks such as plotting multiple lines in one plot, and the data setup that is necessary to perform these tasks, which is a bit different than base R plotting functions, but worth the effort to use since ggplot2 employs universal usage patterns.
While "R in Action" might be better at easing the reader into the R language and environment, this book starts with enough R basics in its first two chapters, such as installing packages and loading data, that most will find it sufficient for getting their feet wet, and the author's introduction to ggplot2 in the appendix combined with Chapter 15 (Getting Your Data into Shape) are not only well done, but very succinct for busy professionals. After discussing bar graphs, line graphs, scatter plots, and summarized data distributions, the author presents annotations, axes, legends, and controlling the overall appearance of graphs, followed by discussions on facets, miscellaneous graphs, and outputting for presentation. If you are new to ggplot2, you will probably need to touch a majority of these chapters to some degree in order to get up to speed, but information is easy to find. Very well recommended.