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> > And it's really hard to beat ggplot.

> To be honest, matplotlib seems a good contender to me (http://matplotlib.org/).

They're quite different, though, and I can see why many prefer ggplot. It's a declarative, domain-specific language that implements a Tufte-inspired "grammar of graphics" (hence the gg- in the name; see section 1.3 of [1], and [2,3]) for very fast and convenient interactive plotting, whereas matplotlib is just a clone of MATLIB's procedural plotting API.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/ggplot2-Elegant-Graphics-Data-Analysis...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/The-Grammar-Graphics-Statistics-Comput...

[3] http://vita.had.co.nz/papers/layered-grammar.html

for learning more about plotting, the gplot2 book is a tad expensive, but worthwhile. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0387981403 (it helped me understand the structure behind the library, which i found confusing from cookbooks etc)

⬐ jasonpbecker

I have found this [site] (http://www.cookbook-r.com/) to be more helpful (plus the online documentation for ggplot2 which is really good).

Hadley's book is really good and a solid treatment (from the author of so many clear, powerful package it's not a surprise), but there have been a lot of changes to ggplot2 since 2009. I have personally found ggplot2 to be so powerful because it lends itself very well to actually learning through using Cookbook-style examples.

⬐ hadley

The cookbook is now an O'Reilly book: http://amzn.com/1449316956

If you're interested in good references for being able to produce `visual stories' I suggest you have a look into the R package `ggplot2' [1].

It's a great way (although a little challenging at first) of being able to produce almost all of the types of plots you're interested in creating. The author of the package also wrote a great book [2] on the package which is worth a read.

A note though, most information on `ggplot2' isn't really aimed at informing you which is the most appropriate plot, merely that a type of plot can be quickly produced.

[1] http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/

[2] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0387981403?ie=UTF8&tag=...

Leland Wilkinson's "The Grammar of Graphics" http://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Graphics-Leland-Wilkinson/dp/0... is also excellent and fully implemented in the R programming language/statistics package ( http://www.amazon.com/ggplot2-Elegant-Graphics-Data-Analysis... )