R: Data Analysis and Visualization

Creating basic scatter plots

This recipe describes how to make scatter plots using some very simple commands. We'll go from a single line of code, which makes a scatter plot from preloaded data, to a script of few lines that produces a scatter plot customized with colors, titles, and axes limits specified by us.

Getting ready

All you need to do to get started is start R. You should have the R prompt on your screen as shown in the following screenshot:

How to do it...

Let's use one of R's built-in datasets called cars to look at the relationship between the speed of cars and the distances taken to stop the cars (recorded in the 1920s).

To make your first ...