Creating beautiful maps with R by David Smith.
From the post:
Spanish R user and solar energy lecturer Oscar Perpiñán Lamigueiro has written a detailed three-part guide to creating beautiful maps and choropleths (maps color-coded with regional data) using the R language. Motivated by the desire to recreate this graphic from the New York Times, Oscar describes how he creates similar high-quality maps using R.
David summarizes the three part series by Oscar Perpiñán Lamigueiro with links to parts, software and data.
No guarantees you will produce maps as good as the New York Times but it won’t be from a lack of instruction. 😉