Creating basic plots with ggplot2

In this recipe, we demonstrate how to use The Grammar of Graphics to construct our very first ggplot2 chart with the superstore sales dataset.

Getting ready

First, download the superstore_sales.csv dataset from the https://github.com/ywchiu/rcookbook/raw/master/chapter7/superstore_sales.csv GitHub link.

Next, you can use the following code to download the CSV file to your working directory:

> download.file('https://github.com/ywchiu/rcookbook/raw/master/chapter7/superstore_sales.csv', 'superstore_sales.csv')

You will also need to load the dplyr package to manipulate the superstore_sales dataset.

How to do it…

Please perform the following steps to create a basic chart with ggplot2:

1. First, install and load the ggplot2 package:

   > install.packages("ggplot2")
   > library(ggplot2)
   

2. Import superstore_sales.csv into an R session:

   > superstore <-read.csv('superstore_sales.csv', header=TRUE)
   > superstore$Order.Date <- as.Date(superstore$Order.Date)
   >...