Choosing Tools to Visualize Data - Data Points: Visualization That Means Something - page 74

R provides base drawing functions that basically enable you to draw what
you want. You can draw lines, shapes, and axes within a plotting frame-
work, so again, like the other programming solutions, you're limited only
by your imagination. Then again, practically every chart type is available
via some R package.

When you
search for some-
thing about R
on the web via
search engines,
the basic name
can sometimes
throw off your
results. Instead,
try searching for
r-project instead
of just R , along
with what you're
looking for. You'll
usually find more
relevant search
results.

Why would you use anything besides R? Why not just do everything in R?
Following are a few reasons. R works on your desktop, so it's not a good
fit for the dynamic web. Saving graphics and images and putting them
on a web page isn't a problem, but it's not going to happen automatically.
You can generate graphics on-the-fly via the web, but so far, the solutions
aren't particularly robust when you compare them to the web-native stuff
such as JavaScript.

R is also not good with interactive graphics and animation. Again, you can
do this in R, but there are better, more elegant ways to accomplish this
using, for example, Flash or Processing.

Finally, you might have noticed that the graphics in Figures 3-19 and 3-20
lack a certain amount of polish. You probably won't see graphics like that
in a newspaper any time soon. You can tighten up the design in R by mess-
ing with different options or writing additional code, but my strategy is
usually to make the base graphic in R and then edit and refine in design
software such as Adobe Illustrator, which is discussed soon. For analyses,
the raw output from R does just fine, but for presentation and storytelling,
it's best to adjust aesthetics.

useFuL r resource

a

R Project for Statistical Computing ( www.r-project.org )

Tr ade - O f f s

Learning programming is learning a new language. It's your computer's lan-
guage of bits and logic. When you work with excel or Tableau for example,
you essentially work with a translator. The buttons and menus are in your
language, and when you click items, the software translates your interaction