R Graphics

The R Series

by Paul Murrell

This third edition of Paul Murrell's classic book on using R for graphics represents a major update, with a complete overhaul in focus and scope. It focuses primarily on the two core graphics packages in R - graphics and grid - and has a new section on integrating graphics. This section includes three new chapters: importing external images in to R; integrating the graphics and grid systems; and advanced SVG graphics.

The emphasis in this third edition is on having the ability to produce detailed and customised graphics in a wide variety of formats, on being able to share and reuse those graphics, and on being able to integrate graphics from multiple systems.

This book is aimed at all levels of R users. For people who are new to R, this book provides an overview of the graphics facilities, which is useful for understanding what to expect from R's graphics functions and how to modify or add to the output they produce. For intermediate-level R users, this book provides all of the information necessary to perform sophisticated customizations of plots produced in R. For advanced R users, this book contains vital information for producing coherent, reusable, and extensible graphics functions.

Genres: Programming

423 pages, ebook

Published November 15, 2018

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

a lot of insihgts for those of us who need to know R's internals and want a companion to the source.

Also worth a glance by anyone who works with grobs (quantmod users).


Finally, if you're thinking of writing your own plotting software (say you want to add histograms or function plotting to idris or some other new language), the R team has put a _lot_ of work and thought into their graphics library. There might not be a better book to give yourself ideas for that kind of job.

[Eugene Mah · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book provides a good introduction to the R graphics system and gives a very good presentation of the kinds of graphs you can generate using R. This book is definitely not a how-to or cookbook for R graphics though. The book assumes the reader is already familiar with R and the graphics related commands, so there's not much explanation of the short code snippets that go along with the figures. If you're new to R, this book won't show you how to create graphs. It will show you the graphing capabilities of R though and possibly get you interested enough to keep using R.

If you do know R, what this book *will* show you is how to do more complex things with R graphics. Half the book covers the traditional graphics model, while the other half covers the Grid and Trellis graphics models. This will be the interesting part of the book because Grid and Trellis look like they let users create really neat graphs and data representations with R.

I would have liked to see some more complete examples in the book, but at least there's an accompanying website that contains all the code used to generate the graphs and errata for the book. This would be a good addition to an R user's bookshelf.

[Jerzy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't think I could recommend this to an R novice (Appendix A, "A Brief Introduction to R," does seem reasonable for a beginner but I'm not sure about the rest)... but it's a well-explained and thorough resource for someone with solid R experience already.
It helped me solidify some concepts about R graphics and pointed out features of which I hadn't been aware. I'll be coming back to this when I need a refresher on plotting regions, layout, data symbols, etc. The "par" cheatsheets on p.51 and 53 are great. And if you want to extend R using grid graphics, this is the place to start.

[Craig Ruaux · Rating 3 out of 5]

Useful book for getting into the fairly complex graphical system of the R Statistical Programming Environment.
Definitely not a bed time read.
Or, maybe, a great bed time read.
Absolutely one for the true science wonk.

[Qingnan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very good reference book for R.