Getting started with matplotlib

For many data scientists, the vast majority of their plotting commands will come directly from pandas or seaborn, which both rely completely on matplotlib to do the actual plotting. However, neither pandas nor seaborn offers a complete replacement for matplotlib, and occasionally you will need to use it directly. For this reason, this recipe will offer a short introduction to the most crucial aspects of matplotlib.

Getting ready

Let's begin our introduction with a look at the anatomy of a matplotlib plot in the following figure:

Matplotlib uses a hierarchy of objects to display all of its plotting items in the output. This hierarchy is key to understanding everything about matplotlib....