The folks at Sharp Sight Labs have another nice demo of ggplot2:
You’ve heard me say it a thousand times: to master data science, you need to practice.
You need to “practice small” by practicing individual techniques and functions. But you also need to “practice big” by working on larger projects.
To get some practice, my recommendation is to find reasonably sized datasets online and plot them.
Wikipedia is a nearly-endless source of good datasets. The great thing about Wikipedia is that many of the datasets are small and well contained. They are also fairly clean, with just enough messiness to make them a bit of a challenge.
As a quick example, this week, we’ll plot some economic data.
The code is deceptively easy considering the scope of the problem.