R spplot tutorials

Question

I'm in need of some tutorials/books/other training materials which cover how to use the spplot function in the sp package in R properly.

As with many of these functions, it seems very powerful, but the documentation doesn't seem to be that helpful unless you know exactly what you want to do. I've found various pages of examples, but they still aren't all that clear.

Are there any resources that take you through how to use spplot to produce some useful maps (for example with raster data, plus overlays of polygons on points, with different color scales, legends, north arrows etc) in a nice step-by-step way?

Ideally I'd love a UseR!-style book that focuses on raster data and map production in R, but the only spatial book of that sort seems to be focused mainly on geostatistics and point data.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I suppose it is the book you have found, but chapter 2 and especially 3 of the Applied Spatial Data Analysis with R cover the creation of maps.

Answer 2

You could try my workshop sessions from this year's UseR! tutorial that I did:

http://www.maths.lancs.ac.uk/~rowlings/Teaching/UseR2012/

It doesn't use spplot (much) but mostly base graphics with a bit of ggplot thrown in. There's a couple of maps with multiple layers of data. There's no north arrows or scale bars - this isn't cartography - I do that in Quantum GIS.

Maybe this will all end up in a book :)