» R Graphics (Computer Science and Data Analysis)

R Graphics (Computer Science and Data Analysis) Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Good, not great
Comment: R is a free software system that runs under Windows, Linux, and the Mac OS. R comprises a programming language, considerable support for statistical computing, and a set of powerful graphics functions. Murrell's book is about graphics.

Graphics in R is done using various packages. One is "graphics", and its description occupies the first half of Murrell's book. But these days "graphics" is looking a little long in the tooth, and contains a number of infelicities that can't be changed because of all the old legacy code out there. Murrell himself wrote "grid" to fix this problem; "grid" is more general and better organized, but its functions are a toolkit for creating graphics; he's only built the tools, not assembled all the elements into simple and easy-to-use high-level plotting functions that "graphics" has. "Grid" occupies the second half of this book. Sandwiched in the middle is a chapter about "Lattice" (by Deepayan Sarkar); Murrell's chapter provides a brief overview, in part because lattice is built on grid, but lattice is better described by the online documentation, Sarkar's own book, and the books by William Cleveland, which introduced the whole idea of conditioned plotting of multivariate data. There's also an helpful (but brief) appendix describing how to get "graphics" and "grid" to work together, and an introduction to programming in R, which is too brief to be of much use of novices, and not detailed enough to help more advanced users.

What's good: Although R comes with on-line documentation, the style of documentation for R is to describe the inputs and outputs of individual functions, but not provide much in the way of a conceptual overview. Murrell provides such an overview. Especially useful are a set of diagrams showing the various coordinate systems, lists of the line types and plotting symbols, and tables of the graphics state parameters. You could probably puzzle this out for yourself with just the built-in documentation, but Murrell's book will save you time and headaches. Also, his website has all the code that produced the book's figures, which can be quite instructive.

What's bad: The description of the "graphics" package is incomplete, and the book's index is just terrible, which makes it hard to find things. Just as an example, if you want to see what the "mai" graphics parameter does, you should be able find it in the index under either "mai" or "par", a function which sets such parameters. There is a function index, but the functions are listed by package, not in a single, alphebetical list. If you know enough to find "par" under the graphics package in the index, then you get referred to a 30-page block of text. You won't find "mai" in the index at all. Nearly useless.

Overall: R has a very powerful programmable graphics system. This book will help you use it. This book could be more complete, and begs for a decent index. A good example of a well-written and thorough book about a computer language is Guy Steele's Common Lisp; the R community hasn't gotten quite to that level yet.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Not for a Beginner
Comment: I am new to R and needed to create a particular style of heat map for a project. I spent 3 weeks studying this book's table of contents, sample chapter, examples on the author's website, etc. until the day came when I needed prepare my presentation. So I went ahead and bought the book. It was not what I needed and, in fact, I have not found it useful in the 2 months that I have owned it. Before the book even arrived I discovered the R Graph Gallery ([...]), which has a heat map that met my needs. My advice to those who are beginning to learn R is to be patient and use the many free, high-quality resources available on the internet for perhaps up to a year before starting to buy books.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Not a how-to or cookbook for R graphics
Comment: The book provides a good introduction to the R graphics system and gives a very good presentation of the kinds of graphs you can generate using R. This book is definitely not a how-to or cookbook for R graphics though. The book assumes the reader is already familiar with R and the graphics related commands, so there's not much explanation of the short code snippets that go along with the figures. If you're new to R, this book won't show you how to create graphs. It will show you the graphing capabilities of R though and possibly get you interested enough to keep using R.

If you do know R, what this book *will* show you is how to do more complex things with R graphics. Half the book covers the traditional graphics model, while the other half covers the Grid and Trellis graphics models. This will be the interesting part of the book because Grid and Trellis look like they let users create really neat graphs and data representations with R.

I would have liked to see some more complete examples in the book, but at least there's an accompanying website that contains all the code used to generate the graphs and errata for the book. This would be a good addition to an R user's bookshelf.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Must-have for learning of R graphics
Comment: It is a book which systematically introduces the traditional and grid system of R graphics. I can find almost every details I want in the past two months after I got the book. Before I read the book, I have been working with R for more than 3 years, but never be very clear to view the structure of R graphics. Thanks to Dr. Paul Murrell, I am much more confident with my knowledge in this area. By the way, he has kindly helped me by email to solve several layout()problems.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Solid reference book for a wide audience
Comment: Unleashing the power of R, particularly its graphing capabilities can be a daunting task. This is a well written book that covers all aspects of R graphics and gives plently of examples (with code). After using R for nearly 3 years now, I learned quite a bit of new information. Plus, the last 2 chapters of the book are very advanced and will likely require another 3 years before I can actually fully use them. Regardless, this a great book for people new and old to R.

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