David Smith shows off a very cool heatmap package called superheat:
While the superheat pacakge uses the ggplot2 package internally, it doesn’t itself follow the grammar of graphics paradigm: the function is more like a traditional base R graphics function with a couple of dozen options, and it creates a plot directly rather than returning a ggplot2 object that can be further customized. But as long as the options cover your heatmap needs (and that’s likely), you should find it a useful tool next time you need to represent data on a grid.
The superheat package apparently works with any R version after 3.1 (and I can confirm it works on the most recent, R 3.3.2). This arXiv paper provides some details and several case studies, and you can find more examples here. Check out the vignette for detailed usage instructions, and download it from its GitHub repository linked below.
Click through for some great-looking examples.