Creating Plots and Charts

My last word is that it all depends on what you visualize.

—Ansel Adams

Among mathematicians and computer scientists, it’s said that a picture is worth 2¹⁰ words. Okay, that’s a bad joke, but it’s one thing to manipulate and compute with data, but quite another to create stunning visualizations that convey useful information.

While there are many ways of building images and charts, Matplotlib is the most widely used Python library for doing so. [MAT] Matplotlib is very flexible and can produce high-quality output for print or digital media. It also has great support for a wide variety of backends that give you powerful mouse-driven interactivity. Generally speaking, if you have a coding project and you need to visualize numeric information, see if Matplotlib already does what you want. This chapter covers the core functionality of this essential library...