But once you've got that down, you have a tool to create many different types of visualizations using the same basic structure.
If ggplot2 isn't installed on your system yet, install it with the command:
install.packages("ggplot2")
You only need to do this once.
To use its functions, load the ggplot2 package into your current R session -- you only need to do this once per R session -- with the library() function:
library(ggplot2)
Onto some ggplot2 examples.
ggplot2 has a "quick plot" function called qplot() that is similar to R's basic plot() function but adds some options. The basic quick plot code:
qplot(disp, mpg, data=mtcars)
generates a scatterplot.
The qplot default starts the y axis at a value that makes sense to R. However, you might want your y axis to start at 0 so you can better see whether changes are truly meaningful (starting a graph's y axis at your first value instead of 0 can sometimes exaggerate changes).
Use the ylim argument to manually set your lower and upper y axis limits:
qplot(disp, mpg, ylim=c(0,35), data=mtcars)
Bonus intermediate tip: Sometimes on a scatterplot you may not be sure if a point represents just one observation or multiple ones, especially if you've got data points that repeat -- such as in this example that ggplot2 creator Hadley Wickham generated with the command:
qplot(cty, hwy, data=mpg)
The "jitter" geom parameter introduces just a little randomness in the point placement so you can better see multiple points:
qplot(cty, hwy, data=mpg, geom="jitter")
As you might have guessed, if there's a "quick plot" function in ggplot2 there's also a more robust, full-featured plotting function. That's called ggplot() -- yes, while the add-on package is called ggplot2, the function is ggplot() and not ggplot2().