This is another book that applies to one of my nascent passions: Statistical programming with R. This book brings forth the central visualization package in ggplot by its author Hadley Wickham. Like most of Hadley's works, the book is meticulously researched and extremely clear. It is a winner in accomplishing its goals of introducing visualization in R. It even contains a short section on modeling in R.


For those who don't know what R is, it is a statistical programming language. It helps statisticians (or programmers like myself) do statistical work efficiently. Hadley is a strong exponent in the community, and this work tells advanced users of R how to do visualization work. It is not meant as an introduction to R (i.e., R for beginners), but as a follow-up book, much like two of Hadley's other works, Advanced R or R Packages.

Hadley uses Leland Wilkinson's The Grammar of Graphics to dissect how graphing works. Data is abstracted from an aesthetic mapping which controls how the data is communicated (e.g., through bar graphs, line graphs, pie graphs). Then these are combined together to give the programmer more control of the graph.

By existing within a programming language (R), this method gives the programmer/user much more control over the final product. Thus, high quality visualizations become a reality with ggplot. Unfortunately, one has to spend time reading a book in order to learn how to do that, but that is a small price to pay for enhanced quality and control. This book is worth the time.
( )