The book is most appropriate to beginner (and early-intermediate) users of R and R graphics. It is very well structured, always with code for generating a graph preceding each graph, and explanations as to how everything works after the graph. The examples are relevant, and are quite easy to follow. While the author does not explicitly include an introduction to R, he explains the functions used in each code segment.
Earlier chapters go through the commonly-used charts, how to make them and and how to tweak certain parameters. The author goes very slowly over the different plots and gives many examples over different chapters. Later chapters cover recipes for more exotic plots (like 3d plots, maps, sparklines, and calendar maps), showing the true power of the R graphics, as well as the author's creativity. I don't think the author intended it to be read from the beginning to the end: the sections are very well structured, so it's pretty easy to flip to a random plot and look at how it's made.
One thing that I didn't like (which some people might like) is that most of the earlier chapters seemed like a puffed up version of the R documentations. While the advantage of having a book is that you get a more approachable and thorough overview of a subject, you can find information much more quickly by using a combination of google, online R graphics tutorials, and the R documentations. For example, if you know you want a bar plot, looking up the documentation for barplot() to see all tweak-able parameters is easier than waiting until chapter 5 to learn a few more of them.
The later chapters are more interesting: it really shows that R can do a lot, and it did give me ideas about how to visualize the data I am currently working with. Of course, the advanced materials are far from complete -- and it can't possibly be complete given the open nature of R: there are many, many packages in R, and the best thing to do if you're looking for something specific is just to use a search engine and read documentations.
So yeah, it's a really well-written book by someone who is definitely qualified to write it (Mittal started http://www.prettygraph.com/). It's a book that does what it intends to do: good for beginners to flip through to get ideas, and well-suited for someone to whom the documentations are too intimidating. If you are at the stage where you're comfortable reading the documentations, though, then maybe about 30%-40% of the book could be helpful: you may still be inspired by some examples, though in that case I'd wonder if the book has enough content to be worthwhile.
So that's it. "R Graph Cookbook" by Hrishi V. Mittal. It was strange to find a bio of my friend Paul Butler on the list of reviewers, though that only affected the degree of my amusement and not how I saw the book.
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