Graphing Data with R: An Introduction

Complex relationships are often more easily grasped by looking at a picture, or a graph, than they might be if one tried to absorb the nuances in a verbal description or discern the relationships in columns of numbers. This book is about using graphical methods to understand complex data by highlighting important relationships and trends, reducing the data to simpler forms, and making it possible to take in a lot of numbers at a glance. The tool set used to accomplish the task is the free programming language and library of programs called "R." The book explains, in plain language, how to download R to a Windows, Mac, or Linux computer, how to enter your own data or to copy publicly available data from many web sites, and how to understand, use, and produce effective graphs.