Adding some data as colors to world map

Hello!

I am a total newbie to map handling, but a keen R user. I have some
estimates by numbers per country (in names, such as Germany, France,
...) and would like to add this information with use of color on world
and perhaps additionally to Europe map. How can this be achieved in R?
Any pointers to relevant literature/tutorials would be fine.

Welcome! The answer depends on how you want to represent the countries 
graphically. Do you want to display the formatted numbers on a map of 
country borders, to fill the country polygons with colour or shading 
representing the values of the numbers, or maybe to put a filled bubble at 
some point representing the countries?

Which countries? Are they already in the maps package (maybe not, some of 
the borders there are rather out-of-date)?

library(maps)
map("world", xlim=c(-12,35), ylim=c(35,65))

shows you a pretty old version of Europe! There are plenty of sources of 
border maps, but getting something matching the borders you need may 
require a bit of googling (usually looking for a vector representation).

Does anybody have recommended websites for current European national 
border data (preferably in a format we can read)?

Roger

Many thanks!

Roger Bivand
Economic Geography Section, Department of Economics, Norwegian School of
Economics and Business Administration, Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen,
Norway. voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 95 43
e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no