Preface to the second edition

Welcome to the second edition of “ggplot2: elegant graphics for data analysis”. I’m so excited to have an updated book that shows off all the latest and greatest ggplot2 features, as well as the great things that have been happening in R and in the ggplot2 community the last five years. The ggplot2 community is vibrant: the ggplot2 mailing list has over 7,000 members and there is a very active Stack Overflow community, with nearly 10,000 questions tagged with ggplot2. While most of my development effort is no longer going into ggplot2 (more on that below), there’s never been a better time to learn it and use it.

I am tremendously grateful for the success of ggplot2. It’s one of the most commonly downloaded R packages (over a million downloads in the last year!) and has influenced the design of graphics packages for other languages. Personally, ggplot2 has bought me many exciting opportunities to travel the world and meet interesting people. I love hearing how people are using R and ggplot2 to understand the data that they care about.

A big thanks for this edition goes to Carson Sievert, who helped me modernise the code, including converting the sources to R Markdown. He also updated many of the examples and helped me proofread the book.