To those of you who hate R, consider investing 1/2 hour to learn the dplyr package. Dplyr is, in my view, Hadley Wickham's real masterpiece and is why I use R f

To those of you who hate R, consider investing 1/2 hour to learn the dplyr package. Dplyr is, in my view, Hadley Wickham's real masterpiece and is why I use R for most data analysis nowadays. As for ggplot, the 'grammar of graphics' approach makes it intuitive to get started with but I often run into trouble with both the inheritance hierarchy and with getting graphics 'the last mile' to presentation-quality. My favorite ggplot2 graphic? The London Cycle Hires Map: http://spatial.ly/2012/02/great-maps-ggplot2/ http://spatial.ly/2012/02/great-maps-ggplot2/