ggplot2 Essentials

ggplot2 is one of the most sophisticated and advanced packages of R and its use is constantly growing in the community of R programmers. This book is the perfect starting point for your journey in learning about one of the most refined and widely used plotting tools—ggplot2.

You will start by taking a tour of the most relevant packages available in R to create plots, such as graphics, lattice, and ggplot2. Following this, you will take a deep dive into the concepts of ggplot2 by covering different kinds of plots that will help you gear up for your first hands-on project. After this first taste of the capabilities of ggplot2, you will explore in detail the visualization approach implemented in this package, the so-called grammar of graphics, providing you with the basics to understand the backstage concepts in the plotting functions. Finally, you will take a look at some specialized and sophisticated applications of ggplot2, such as how to realize a complex scatterplot matrix, heatmaps, and how to make spatial visualization graphs.