ggplot2-book VS box

I also only recently started using ggplot after doing most of my graphs with base R‘s plot() function. I started by reading ggplot2 by Hadley Wickham which is also available as a free ebook. Reading the first few chapters is enough to enable you to plot many basic plots. I can’t imagine going back to any other visualization tool ever again. Absolutely love the freedom ggplot gives you.

His ggplot book will teach you all you need to know about R plotting, and is probably right at your current level. It is likewise pretty great, ggplot

The OG book is still the best in my opinion! https://ggplot2-book.org/

You could use base R, see ?plot but a lot of people would use ggplot2. However, looking at your data it won’t look very good because there’s going to be very few points per country.

If you included DESCRIPTION to your repository (like in ggplot2-book - https://github.com/hadley/ggplot2-book/blob/master/DESCRIPTION ) devtools::install_deps() and renv::install() will install dependencies listed there as would pip with requirements.txt , you can trigger this from your R script, from command line or from whatever deployment / automation tool you are using.

Chapters 1-8 of https://adv-r.hadley.nz/, https://r4ds.had.co.nz/ , and https://ggplot2-book.org/ were covered in my statistical computing courses. I don't think it gets much more advanced than that at the undergrad level.

You can check out more about Ggplot2 here: https://ggplot2-book.org/

* "ggplot2: Elegant graphics for data analysis" : https://ggplot2-book.org/

As for organising code within a project, as mentioned packages really don’t allow this beyond collation order. The best solution in this space is the ‘box’ package which implements a fully-featured module system for R. ‘box’ notably gets used by some folks to implement large-scale Shiny applications; if this is what you’re after, I would recommend the ‘rhino’ framework, which builds upon Siny and ‘box’.

You can write amazing, clean, modular code with the box package.

I would look into box https://github.com/klmr/box if you haven’t heard of it already

Shapeless plug: check out the already mentioned ‘box’, I think it’s strictly superior to ‘import’ (but I’m biased).

By contrast, R code doesn’t need to change the working directory at all! Having to do so hides other flaws in the code. For instance, when trying to load code or data, use the tools provided by R. That is, write packages and use system.file or, when not writing packages, use ‘box’.

‘box’ fixes that.

I think your use-case is best addressed by the ‘targets’ package. But I would also recommend checking out the ‘box’ package for a more general way of structuring R projects in modules which isn’t supported well natively by R (disclaimer: I wrote that package). Writing R code as modules fundamentally side-steps the issue of having to deal with absolute paths. Instead, all code and data are either contained in the module or can be accessed relative to the working directory.

However, using ‘box’, as recommended in another comment, allows you to achieve the same effect with less (and cleaner) code, by declaring your imports locally with the box::use function.

If you're writing you're own code you can use packageName::functionName(), or the box package. Which is definitely useful on larger codebases.