Webscrapping baby names

This exercise in webscraping and plotting with ggplot, courtesy of the Command-Line Worldview blog, reminds me of the chapter in Freakanomics where these discuss trends in -- and trendy -- baby names.

R and batman

As if R and ggplot weren't cool enough, you can now draw the Batman symbol using code from a Chinese bioinformatician's blog. Another reason R is cooler than SAS.

The Learning R Blog

The Learning R blog has some great examples for using ggplot. In particular, the blog details how to make plots from the book(1) on the lattice package with ggplot.

(1) Lattice: Multivariate Data Visualization

Making basic plots with qplot( ) in the ggplot2 package

The package qqplot2 offers a lot of improvements over the basic plot() function in R. The basic syntax is luckily not that different than plot().

A qplot statement looks like this:

qplot(xaxis, yaxis, data = dataframe, geom = "point", color = category, xlab = "label", ylab = "label", main = "title")

So, a plot statement could look like

qplot(mass, offspring, data = reproduction, geom = "point", color = plot)

geom can take on several things:
geom = "line"
geom = c("point", "smooth") => a scatter plot with a smoothing spline
geom ="histogram" => standard histogram
geom = "density" => a smooth distribution curve instead of a histogram

Graphs with multiple panels are created by including "facets = "