Preface to the third edition

Welcome to the third edition of “ggplot2: elegant graphics for data analysis”. I’m so excited to have a new edition of the book updated for all the changes that have happened to ggplot2 in the last five years. I’m also excited to finally have an online version of the book, <http://ggplot2-book.org/>, thanks to a renegotiated contract with Springer.

Since the last version of the book, the major change to ggplot2 itself is the growth in the contributor community. While I still lead the project and continue to care deeply about visualisation, I’m no longer involved in the day-to-day development of the package. At the time of writing, the core developers of ggplot2 are:

• Winston Chang
• Lionel Henry
• Thomas Lin Pedersen
• Kohske Takahashi
• Claus Wilke
• Kara Woo
• Hiroaki Yutani
• Dewey Dunnington

You can see an up-to-date list and how to become a core developer in the ggplot2 governance document.