This new edition to the classic book by ggplot2 creator Hadley Wickham highlights compatibility with knitr and RStudio. ggplot2 is a data visualization package for R that helps users create data graphics, including those that are multi-layered, with ease. With ggplot2, it's easy to:

produce handsome, publication-quality plots with automatic legends created from the plot specification

superimpose multiple layers (points, lines, maps, tiles, box plots) from different data sources with automatically adjusted common scales

add customizable smoothers that use powerful modeling capabilities of R, such as loess, linear models, generalized additive models, and robust regression

save any ggplot2 plot (or part thereof) for later modification or reuse

create custom themes that capture in-house or journal style requirements and that can easily be applied to multiple plots

approach a graph from a visual perspective, thinking about how each component of the data is represented on the final plot

This book will be useful to everyone who has struggled with displaying data in an informative and attractive way. Some basic knowledge of R is necessary (e.g., importing data into R). ggplot2 is a mini-language specifically tailored for producing graphics, and you'll learn everything you need in the book. After reading this book you'll be able to produce graphics customized precisely for your problems, and you'll find it easy to get graphics out of your head and on to the screen or page.

Hadley is Chief Scientist at RStudio. He is interested in building better tools for data science. His work includes R packages for data analysis (ggplot2, dplyr, tidyr); packages that make R less frustrating (lubridate for dates, stringr for strings, httr for accessing web APIs); and that make it easier to do good software development in R (roxygen2, testthat, devtools). He is also a writer, educator, and frequent contributor to conferences promoting more accessible and more effective data analysis.