Chapter 5: Introducing the Grammar of Graphics

This chapter will introduce the Grammar of Graphics, which enables us to describe complex graphics simply and quickly. It is advantageous for creating statistical plots and performing data analysis tasks, as it allows for fast data exploration. Learning the basics of the Grammar of Graphics will allow you to catch up quickly with the numerous packages that implement some version of it. In particular, this chapter will teach you about the most popular Julia packages that use some variation of the Grammar of Graphics: Gadfly, VegaLite, and AlgebraOfGraphics.

This chapter will also introduce a fundamental tool for data analysis – the DataFrames package. We will see that the Julia libraries that use the Grammar of Graphics are tightly tied to this tabular representation of data. We will also discuss the correct data layout by introducing the concept of tidy data tables. This will significantly help you perform basic data analysis...