Winston Chang - R Graphics Cookbook Practical Recipes for Visualizing Data

by Winston Chang

Copyright 2019 Winston Chang. All rights reserved.

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When the first edition of this book was published five years ago, thephrase data science had only recently entered the popular lexicon.Today, the phrase is unavoidable if youre involved with the sciences,journalism, or high-tech industries. Many interrelated developments havemade this possible: theres a general awareness that understandingquantitative data has tangible benefits; there are better and morewidely available educational resources about how to do data science; andfinally, the tools have evolved, becoming easier to use and get startedwith.

The goal of this book is to help you understand your data by visualizingit, and to help you convey that understanding to others. You can thinkof data analysis as the process of transforming raw data into ideas insomebodys mind. One of the key techniques for doing this is to createvisualizations of the data. Our brains have very highly developed visualpattern detection systems, and data visualizations are a way toefficiently use those visual systems to get quantitative informationinto a persons mind.

Each recipe in this book lists a problem and a solution. In most cases,the solutions I offer arent the only way to do things in R, but theyare, in my opinion, the best way. One of the reasons for Rs popularityis that there are many available add-on packages, each of which providessome functionality for R. There are many packages for visualizing datain R, but this book primarily uses ggplot2.

This book isnt meant to be a comprehensive manual of all the differentways of creating data visualizations in R, but hopefully it will helpyou figure out how to make the graphics you have in mind. Or, if yourenot sure what you want to make, browsing its pages may give you someideas about whats possible.