In this chapter, we gave you an overview of the landscape of plotting packages in R. We got an introduction to graphic devices and the fundamental graphic package base. This includes the base graphic parameters, and how to annotate with base plotting functions. The basic process of plot creation with this package is first, the initialization of a new plot, and second, the extension of an existing plot.

This was followed by a short overview of the famous Lattice package, which makes it possible to create a plot including any annotations with only a single function call.

After that, we gave you an introduction into the world of ggplot2. Hadley Wickham created this graphics package, and it is based on The Grammar of Graphics book, written by Leland Wilkinson. You can use this package to create powerful graphics and adapt them completely to your needs. Graphics created with the ggplot2 package consist of three elements: data, a set of geoms, and a coordinate system.

At the end of this chapter...