Wednesday, January 16, 2013

R Graphics Cookbook

What is R programming language? R is an open source programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. The R language is widely used among statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis. R is an implementation of the S programming language combined with lexical scoping semantics inspired by Scheme. You can download R from R-Project.
What is R Graphics Cookbook book? The R graphics Cookbook (Practical Recipes for Visualizing Data) book by Winston Chang provides more than 150 recipes to help you generate high-quality graphs quickly, without having to comb through all the details of R' graphing systems. Each recipe that will points you in the problem with idea to solve the problem. You can follow step by step from each problem and you will see results though the picture. It's all helpful you enjoy to read and practice from a book.
Most of the recipes use the ggplot2 package, ggplot2 is a plotting system for R, based on the grammar of graphics, which tries to take the good parts of base and lattice graphics and none of the bad parts. It takes care of many of the fiddly details that make plotting a hassle (like drawing legends) as well as providing a powerful model of graphics that makes it easy to produce complex multi-layered graphics.

Readers should be able to understand all contents in a book easily from idea to show in a book. However, I believe readers should know a little about a basic of R. It will help readers to understand from a book quickly. I had done by test each recipe. It's very cool. Example:
> library(gcookbook) # For the data set
> cb <- br="br" climate="climate" erkeley="erkeley" source="=" subset="subset">> cb$valence[cb$Anomaly10y >= 0] <- br="br" pos="pos">> cb$valence[cb$Anomaly10y < 0] <- br="br" neg="neg">> png("myplot.png", width=400, height=400)
> ggplot(cb, aes(x=Year, y=Anomaly10y)) +
+ geom_area(aes(fill=valence)) +
+ geom_line() +
+ geom_hline(yintercept=0)
> dev.off()
windows
      2
>
I believe this book is useful for people who are interested in the R Graphics. You can use this book as reference. All Contents in book is very great, but it might have some errors. The book arrangement is friendly for readers. In book, you will be able to see pictures to explain details for each recipe.
You can read Free Sampler.

About the Author:
Winston Chang is a software engineer at RStudio, where he works on data visualization and software development tools for R. He holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from Northwestern University. During his time as a graduate student, he created a website called "Cookbook for R", which contains recipes for handling common tasks in R. In previous lives, he was a philosophy graduate student and a computer programmer.

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