[R-sig-teaching] Choice of graphics package

[Michael Weylandt]

If you're doing 'standard' statistical graphics, I'd recommend ggplot2. You'll get more polished defaults than with base graphics (keeps students happier) and it encourages good practice (make good graphics easy and bad graphics hard). 

This isn't to say ggplot2 isn't a good choice for fancier graphics as well, but I find custom graphics take more work than with base graphics (sometimes you just need a call to lines()). 

> On Nov 26, 2015, at 9:23 AM, Granaas, Michael <Michael.Granaas at usd.edu> wrote:
> 
> I am working with first year grad students in psychology and have sloooooooowly been adding some R content to the course.  I do not have a systematic plan and I haven't yet found the teaching related materials that will be a good match to my particular course structure.  
> 
> I noticed Randall Pruim's comment:
> "4) For teaching, the decision between base graphics, lattice, and ggplot2 (and soon ggvis) is an important one to think through.  Depending on the goals of the course, I can imagine good arguments for using lattice or ggplot2.  I don’t find base graphics compelling for teaching and never teach it to my students."
> 
> Which caused me to wonder....which package should I be focusing on?
> 
> For these students I am focused on fairly basic graphics such as boxplots, histograms, scatterplots.  What are the pros/cons of the different packages that I should consider as I work to be more planful in my incorporation of R?
> 
> Michael
> 
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> Michael Granaas                                           mgranaas at usd.edu
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