As you might have noticed, ggplot2 recently turned 1.0.0. This release incorporated a handful of new features and bug fixes, but most importantly reflects that ggplot2 is now a mature plotting system and it will not change significantly in the future.
This does not mean ggplot2 is dead! The ggplot2 community is rich and vibrant and the number of packages that build on top of ggplot2 continues to grow. We are committed to maintaining ggplot2 so that you can continue to rely on it for years to come.
Since ggplot2 is now stable, and the ggplot2 book is over five years old and rather out of date, I’m also happy to announce that I’m working on a second edition. I’ll be ably assisted in this endeavour by Carson Sievert, who’s so far done a great job of converting the source to Rmd and updating many of the examples to work with ggplot2 1.0.0. In the coming months we’ll be rewriting the data chapter to reflect modern best practices (e.g. tidyr and dplyr), and adding sections about new features.
We’d love your help! The source code for the book is available on github. If you’ve spotted any mistakes in the first edition that you’d like to correct, we’d really appreciate a pull request. If there’s a particular section of the book that you think needs an update (or is just plain missing), please let us know by filing an issue. Unfortunately we can’t turn the book into a free website because of my agreement with the publisher, but at least you can now get easily get to the source.