R is a free open language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It particularly gained wide popularity among scientists from different fields, journalists, and private companies. There are various reasons for that, openness and gratuity may be couple of them. Also, R requires minimal programming background and has a vibrant online community.
From community, a bunch of useful graphical packages had come. This chapter covers basic aspects of three of them: ggplot2, plotly, and ggvis. The first one (ggplot2) has been there for a long time, is very mature, and is very useful to build non-interactive graphics.
Both plotly and ggvis are much younger packages, which can build interactive plots. Both are shiny compatible and can well address the matter of web applications. Beginning with installation and loading, this chapter goes all the way through explaining the basic framework of all those three packages, while demonstrating how to use ggplot2 primitives.
