[R] recommended combo of apps for new user?

[hadley wickham]

On 8/18/07, John Kane <jrkrideau at yahoo.ca> wrote:
> I'm just starting to get a grasp on how R works so
> don't take my words too seriously but have a look at
> http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/ for some idea
> of what R can do for publication quality graphics.  It
> is always possible that you might need another
> graphics package as well but I think it unlikely.

I may be in the minority, but I really don't like the R graph gallery.
 To my eye it largely provides examples of what you _shouldn't_ do
with graphics (and also seems rather unloved at the moment, given the
large number of spam keywords).  It fails to provide examples of using
graphics to gain insight into your data and mainly focuses on drawing
pretty (ugly) pictures.

Unfortunately there aren't many better resources at the moment.
Deepayan Sarkar is working on a lattice book, and hopefully he will
make the plots available on his website as well.  I'm also working on
a book for my ggplot2 package (http://had.co.nz/ggplot2) but that
won't be finished until next year.  For interactive graphics, the
GGobi book (http://www.ggobi.org/book/) is very close to being
published, and provides details about the R-GGobi link as well as many
techniques for gaining insight into your data interactively.  Another
option is the Graphics of Large Dataset book (http://rosuda.org/gold/)
which provides a wider survey of state of the art in interactive
graphics for large datasets.

Hadley