Advanced graphics using ggplot2

Here are a list of good resources:

1. Top 50 ggplot2 Visualizations - The Master List (With Full R Code)
2. ggplot2 extensions
3. ggthemes

Exploring Minard's 1812 plot with ggplot2

Very cool post.

How to get county FIPS from state and place names

This post demonstrates how to use the acs package to extract county FIPS from arbitrary combination of state and city names.

For Stata users, the geoinpoly package can extract FIPS from a combination of latitude and longitude coordinates.