Introducing ggplot2

The ggplot2 package is a data visualization package for R, which implements the so-called grammar of graphics, and makes it easy and accessible.

Looking at the history of ggplot2

Hadley Wickham mainly created the ggplot2 package back in 2005. Since then, it has grown to be one of the most popular packages of the R language, and a huge community formed around it. Its main focus lies in making plotting in R very accessible, and so, it can be used as a replacement for the base graphics system.

The package, basically, is a successor of the famous lattice package and tries to take from it only the good parts and leave out the bad. So, it wants to make the creation of graphics easier.

On February 25, 2014, Hadley Wickham formally announced that ggplot2 is shifting to maintenance mode. This means that features will no longer be added, but major bugs will still be fixed. This is not because they lost interest in the package, but because it is feature-complete, meaning that the package...