What you need for this book

You need to download R to generate the visualizations. You can download and install R using the CRAN website available at http://cran.r-project.org/. All the recipes were written using RStudio. RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for R and can be downloaded from http://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/. Many of the visualizations are created using R packages and they are discussed in their respective recipes.

In few of the recipes, I have introduced users to some other open source platforms such as ScapeToad, ArcGIS, and Mapbox. Their installation procedures are outlined in their respective recipes.