This O’Reilly cookbook provides more than 150 recipes to help scientists, engineers, programmers, and data analysts generate high-quality graphs quickly—without having to comb through all the details of R’s graphing systems. Each recipe tackles a specific problem with a solution you can apply to your own project and includes a discussion of how and why the recipe works.

Most of the recipes in this second edition use the updated version of the ggplot2 package, a powerful and flexible way to make graphs in R. You’ll also find expanded content about the visual design of graphics. If you have at least a basic understanding of the R language, you’re ready to get started with this easy-to-use reference.

• Use R’s default graphics for quick exploration of data


• Create a variety of bar graphs, line graphs, and scatter plots


• Summarize data distributions with histograms, density curves, box plots, and more


• Provide annotations to help viewers interpret data


• Control the overall appearance of graphics


• Explore options for using colors in plots


• Create network graphs, heat maps, and 3D scatter plots


• Get your data into shape using packages from the tidyverse