Understanding the Plots package

We saw how to create heatmaps and line, scatter, and bar plots using Plots at the end of Chapter 1, An Introduction to Julia for Data Visualization and Analysis. But we have not discussed the package, so let's do that here.

The Plots package is very different from the packages described in this chapter, and it has a pretty unique feature. In the previous section of this chapter, we have seen many plotting libraries available from Julia, each of them with different weaknesses and strengths. But, more importantly, those packages have different interfaces, making it difficult for a user to take advantage of all of them. That is the main problem that Plots solves. To achieve that, Plots offers a single interface that allows you to access the different plotting packages. These packages are Plots' backends.

When creating a plot with Plots, we formulate plotting instructions in a backend-independent way that the Plots library translates and...