Displaying time series, spatial, and space-time data with R is available for pre-order

Two years ago, motivated by a proposal from John Kimmel, Executive Editor at Chapman & Hall/CRC Press, I started working in a book, “Displaying time series, spatial, and space-time data with R”. This book presents methods and R code for producing high-quality graphics of time series, spatial, and space-time data.

The book is already available for pre-order at CRC Press and Amazon. It will be published on April 4th, 2014. Along with the main graphics from the text, the book website offers access to the datasets used in the examples as well as the full R code.

I have spent a large amount of time and effort in this project but, now that it is finished, I can say it has been worthwhile. One of the challenges was to produce a fully reproducible book including hundreds of code chunks and graphics, and survive after several rounds of peer-reviewing. Among the tools that can create reproducible documents with R, I decided to use these gems of open-source software:

• GNU Emacs as development environment.
• R (of course!) with Emacs Speaks Statistics.
• org-mode for authoring text and code.
• LaTeX with AUCTeX to produce the final document.

If you are interested in the technical details read about writing a book with Emacs and friends.