Base graphics and ggplot2

There are lots of user-contributed graphics packages in R that can produce some wonderful graphics. You may wish to take a look for yourself at the CRAN task view at cran.r-project.org/web/views/Graphics.html. We will have a very quick look at two approaches: base graphics, so called because they form the default graphical environment within a vanilla installation of R, and ggplot2, a highly popular user-contributed package produced by Hadley Wickham, which is a little trickier to master than base graphics, but can very rapidly produce a wide range of graphical data summaries. We will cover two graphs that are familiar to everyone: the bar chart and the line chart.