Product Description

R is rapidly growing in popularity as the environment of choice for data analysis and graphics both in academia and industry. Lattice brings the proven design of Trellis graphics (originally developed for S by William S. Cleveland and colleagues at Bell Labs) to R, considerably expanding its capabilities in the process. Lattice is a powerful and elegant high level data visualization system that is sufficient for most everyday graphics needs, yet flexible enough to be easily extended to handle demands of cutting edge research. Written by the author of the lattice system, this book describes it in considerable depth, beginning with the essentials and systematically delving into specific low levels details as necessary. No prior experience with lattice is required to read the book, although basic familiarity with R is assumed.

The book contains close to150 figures produced with lattice. Many of the examples emphasize principles of good graphical design; almost all use real data sets that are publicly available in various R packages. All code and figures in the book are also available online, along with supplementary material covering more advanced topics.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #172160 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 268 pages

Review

From the reviews:

"This book can be seen as a valuable source for lattice users at all levels. … The book nicely shows that making good graphics is a process and the reader is guided by the author in a wealth of examples through the various steps needed to reach the final result. A nice feature of the book is that it has an accompanying homepage that contains all the R code and figures of the book." (Klaus Nordhausen, International Statistical Review, Vol. 76 (3), 2008)

"Lattice is a package for R, and it greatly extends the already impressive graphical capabilities. … I suggest that many users of lattice (and most users of R probably ought to use lattice) should buy this book. … if one is using this book for self-study, exercises would be very helpful. … I recommend this book to anyone with a particular interest in the lattice package or a general interest in R graphics." (Peter L. Flom, The American Statistician, Vol. 63 (1), February, 2009)

Customer Reviews

Outstanding
Deepayan Sarkar won a prize for programming Lattice. He deserves another for writing this book. The usual style of help files in R (including Lattice) is terse; this is a deliberate choice by the developers. Presumably, a lot of people like this terseness - but I am not one of them, and there are many others I know of who share my confusion at some of the help files.

Now, there's a whole book on Lattice, and it's written in an accessible style that will let me use Lattice much more creatively and with many fewer errors.

I think even experts on Lattice may find new things here; but for newcomers to Lattice, it's an indispensable guide.

Excellent book, excellent package...
Exactly the book you want if you're going to use lattice. And if you're serious about graphics in R you want to be using either lattice or ggplot2. I've been very pleased with the book and have tabbed quite a few pages for quick reference.

As a side note, lattice is like R's base graphics on steroids. After having this book for a while, I decided to investigate ggplot2, the other major R graphics package, and I think I'll stick with ggplot2. It has a totally different philosophy from lattice (and thus base graphics) which allows for an incredible flexibility without resorting to tinkering with the engine (i.e. lattice's panel functions). ggplot2 has a draft PDF manual online and a nice reference website.

I ultimately chose ggplot2, but I still give this lattice book high marks and will keep it nearby for if I have to work with lattice. With its status as a recommended R package, lattice is more widespread and several packages now use it as their graphics foundation.

Very helpful
I learned far more from a few hours of reading this book than I did from countless hours tinkering with Lattice graphs. I would recommend it without hesitation to any novice or intermediate user of R.

Furthermore, while both are helpful, this book is probably a better first purchase than R Graphics (Computer Science and Data Analysis).