Side by Side histograms in the Same Graph in R?

Question

This should actually be really simple but I'm having a really hard time finding a solution to this problem.

I have two very simple numeric vectors in R. I am simply trying to plot a histogram with them. However I would like them to be on the same graph. The tricky part is R overlaps these two histograms by default. I would like the bins to be simply side by side so I can get a better visual representation of the data.

Basically this is what I want to do

I am fairly new to R and statistical computing languages in general so I would appreciate it if you would answer my frustrating problem.

Answer 1

The example comes from using the plotrixpackage. Code was found here. You will first need to install that package before you can access the multihist function:

#install.packages("plotrix")
require(plotrix)

l <- list(rnorm(50),rnorm(50,sd=2),rnorm(50,mean=3))
multhist(l)

Answer 2

Here is the ggplot version of this graph.

require(ggplot2)
require(reshape2)

set.seed(1)
df <- data.frame(x = rnorm(n = 1000, mean = 5, sd = 2),
                 y = rnorm(n = 1000, mean = 2),
                 z = rnorm(n = 1000, mean = 10))



ggplot(melt(df), aes(value, fill = variable)) + geom_histogram(position = "dodge")