Congratulations on making it all the way through! You now have everything you need to make an unlimited number of charts and graphs in R.
The key now is practice. The more you practice the better you get and the easier it is to build what you want. It’s a nice feeling to be limited by only your imagination and not by the tools right in front of you.
Here are some quick tips as you move forward.
To avoid getting stuck…
- Get it to work first and worry about the rest later. A common pitfall is to spend a lot of time optimizing code and trying to do everything the “right” way. While these are all fine endeavors, don’t lose focus on the main goal, which is to visualize your data. Optimization will find its way into your code as you work on more projects, but for now, just try to make stuff. And honestly, for static graphics in R, if a graph that took five seconds to produce looks the same as one that took half a second, no one will cry boo.
- Learn to read documentation. R developers and package authors actually do a pretty good job of explaining their functions, but there’s a learning curve. You have to get comfortable with some definitions, data structures, etc (most of which you covered during this course). I always find usage examples at the end of each doc especially helpful. Run them, figure out what they’re doing, and then try it with your own data.
- Provide errors when asking for help. It’s tough for anyone to provide support when all you tell them is that something doesn’t work. At what point does the code fail? What does the error say? Search for the full error message on Google before posting to StackOverflow or an email list. It’s likely someone had the same or similar problem as you.
To learn more visualization types in R…
- Work with various types of data to learn new visual forms. Visualization types lend themselves to certain types of data. If you work with the same data all the time, you probably will only work with a handful of visualization types.
- Copy. I don’t mean plagiarize. Try to mimic other graphics that you find interesting to build your visual vocabulary. Then build on that to develop your own style.
To learn more about your data…
- Study statistics. So many people stop at visualization to learn about data, and they forget that there’s an entire field of study dedicated to analysis. At the very least, learning statistics beyond bell curves and hypothesis tests forces you to think about data more critically and to ask more useful questions.
- Think like a statistician. If you don’t have time to become a statistician, at least you can think like one.
Once again, good job making it this far. You likely know more than most about making graphics in R now. For more visualization tutorials, check out the archive where new tutorials go up monthly.
