20190228 R Programming D

As part of the bioinformatics training for UWC Department of Biotechnology, I taught a five-day course on the basics of programming, using the R language. This lecture emphasizes the challenges of visualization, comparing the plotting capabilities of "base" R against those of the popular ggplot2 library. We emphasized the "grammar of graphics" approach, establishing a ggplot object that encapsulated the data and then adding a geom or two (or three) to visualize them. Our effort incorporated a scatterplot, a boxplot, and a histogram. We closed out the comparison with an example of how to export our finished images to a PDF or other vector graphic format, such as SVG or EMF.