The objective of this chapter is to provide you with a general overview of the plotting environments in R and of the most efficient way of coding your graphs in it. We will go through the most important Integrated Development Environment (IDE) available for R as well as the most important packages available for plotting data; this will help you to get an overview of what is available in R and how those packages are compared with ggplot2. Finally, we will dig deeper into the grammar of graphics, which represents the basic concepts on which ggplot2 was designed. But first, let's make sure that you have a working version of R on your computer.