Histograms are good, density plots are also good. Violin and bean plots too. Recently I had someone ask for a plot where you could see each individual point along a continuum, give the points specific colours based on a second variable (similar to the figure), which deviates somewhat from the typical density type plots. Apparently, they’re called beeplots or beeswarms. And there’s a way to make them in R (of course, there’s probably more than one… ggplot2??).

Here’s one way (slightly modified from the packages help files)…

library(beeswarm) # assuming you've installed it ;)
data(breast)
beeswarm(time_survival ~ ER, data = breast,
         pch = 16, pwcol = 1 + as.numeric(event_survival),
         xlab = "", ylab = "Follow-up time (months)", horizontal = TRUE, 
         labels = c("ER neg", "ER pos"), method = "c")
legend("topright", legend = c("Yes", "No"),
       title = "Censored", pch = 16, col = 1:2)

Horizontal is optional of course…

Feel free to comment if you know of other approaches.

See here for more examples.

Hope that helps someone