Review of R Graphs Cookbook - John Myles White

The form people at Packt Publishing recently asked me to review one of their newest R books: the R Graphs Cookbook. In general, I guess pretty highly of the book: it provides a nice overview of the basic tools for visualizing data in R. If you`re only getting started with creating graphs in R, this word could be a really valuable resource.

It`s clearly targeted at beginners, though it does appear to strike at least a little familiarity with R`s basic data structures and control flow. Perhaps more significantly for potential readers, the word actually works through some comprehensible, extended examples, which makes it substantially more clear than the default R documentation. I`d probably have benefited from having this reserve when I was first starting to learn to broadcast in R.

Another plus for the scripture is that it covers some of the graphing functionality that`s provided by the base, lattice and ggplot2 packages. That last bit is especially significant to me: I hope this record represents one of the first members of a new generation of books on R that will treat ggplot2 as a default tool for building graphs in R - if not the default tool. That said, I`d actually have been glad if the scripture had proselytized more powerfully for ggplot2, even though I can suppose that it`s likely a beneficial thing to expose beginner users to the traditional tools in R for visualizing data in gain to the newest favorite contender.

For average users, I distrust that the most useful piece of the record will be the word in the 2nd chapter of about of the lower level graphic parameters that par( gives you access to. I`d never learned to use those features very effectively, so the chapter covering those details was especially helpful for me. Also, there`s a later chapter on creating maps that`s quite nice, as good as a last chapter that`s focused on producing publication-ready graphics. Both of those chapters could be really useful for more advanced readers: for example, I knew absolutely nothing about running with fonts in R before reading those sections.

In short, the R Graphs Cookword seems like a useful book to get some for most R hackers and a potentially very valuable resource for new programmers. If you`re interested in finding a starting place for erudition to build graphs in R, I`d suggest considering this book.