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matplotlib Plotting Cookbook Paperback – March 26, 2014

by Alexandre Devert (Author)

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Learn how to create professional scientific plots using matplotlib, with more than 60 recipes that cover common use cases

About This Book

Learn plotting with self-contained, practical examples that cover common use cases
Build your own solutions with the orthogonal recipes
Learn to customize and combine basic plots to make sophisticated figures

Who This Book Is For

If you are an engineer or scientist who wants to create great visualizations with Python, rather than yet another specialized language, this is the book for you. While there are several very competent plotting packages, matplotlib is “just” a Python module. Thus, if you know some Python already, you will feel at home from the first steps on. In case you are an application writer, you won't be left out since the integration of matplotlib is covered.

What You Will Learn

Discover how to create all the common plots you need
Enrich your plots with annotations and sophisticated legends
Take control of your plots and master colors, linestyle, and scales
Add a dimension to your plots and go 3D
Integrate your graphics into your applications
Automate your work and generate a large batch of graphics
Create interactive plots with matplotlib
Combine your plots to create sophisticated visualizations

In Detail

matplotlib is part of the Scientific Python modules collection. matplotlib provides a large library of customizable plots and a comprehensive set of backends. It tries to make easy things easy and hard things possible. You can generate plots, add dimensions to the plots, and also make the plots interactive with just a few lines of code with matplotlib. Also, matplotlib integrates well with all common GUI modules.

This book is a head-first, hands-on journey into matplotlib, the complete and definite plotting package for Python. You will learn about the basic plots, how to customize them, and combine them to make sophisticated figures. Along with basic plots, you will also learn to make professional scientific plots.

In this book, you will start with the common figures that are offered by most plotting packages. You will learn how to add annotations, and play with styles, colors, scales, and shapes so that you can add personality and visual punch to your graphics. You will also see how to combine several graphics. With this book you will learn how to create sophisticated visualizations with simple code. Finally, you can make your plots interactive.

After reading "matplotlib Plotting Cookbook", you will be able to create the highest quality plots.

Print length

222 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Packt Publishing
Publication date

March 26, 2014
Dimensions

7.5 x 0.5 x 9.25 inches
ISBN-10

1849513260
ISBN-13

978-1849513265
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Packt Publishing (March 26, 2014)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 222 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1849513260
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1849513265
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.5 x 0.5 x 9.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,860,781 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,220 in Mathematical & Statistical Software
- #3,079 in Python Programming

Customer Reviews:
19 ratings

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Amazon Customer

Useful cookbook... but not a very complete guide

Reviewed in the United States on February 18, 2015

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A book worth having as it is often easier to read a book and browse it for examples than to scavenge the web for examples and documentation.

My principal disappointment is that the book never really stops and pauses to carefully explain the 'object oriented' (OO) or 'pythonic' approach to manipulating figures in matplotlib. If you are like me you were moved to buy a matplotlib cookbook/manual primarily because you are trying to learn scientific python plotting but 90% of the interesting examples you can find uses this OO approach.

The first 115 pages of this book assumes you're not interested in that at all but instead in the easier to learn and explain approach to plotting which hides a lot of detail behind the scenes. I agree this is the way to start, but I kept expecting a full new chapter to arrive that would finally pause to explain the grand design/OO-oriented philosophy behind Matplotlib which would help me understand how/why things work. But there is no such chapter or section.

Finally on page 116 we do get a brief mention of the way that matplotlib really works "behind the scenes" with the explanation that [and I quote] "...[A] figure object represents a figure as a whole. Usually, this object is created implicitly, behind the scenes...by creating the object explicitly, we can control various aspects of a figure, including its aspect ratio."

Great, I thought, matplotlib's secrets are finally about to be revealed.... but that was only a passing mention. It's not until page 135 that we see code again now this time finally explicitly creating a figure object instance with "fig = plt.figure(...)". There are several more examples in the book like this after this that follow the object-instance approach, and these have been very useful for finally figuring things out myself.. But I think an opportunity was missed to make this a much more useful book. All that said, I'm not at all sorry I purchased this and I don't see much else out there that is similar (which is surprising)..

7 people found this helpful

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Douglas Lewit

Three Stars

Reviewed in the United States on November 16, 2014

Verified Purchase

Too short but not bad. Very useful.

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Sebastian

A good alternative to the official matplotlib documentation

Reviewed in the United States on June 4, 2014

As a frequent matplotlib user I have to say that this book really fulfills it's promise as a cookbook by covering the most common use cases, and it is a pretty good and thorough introduction for beginners too (Python beginners as well as matplotlib beginners). However, the problem of this book is that there is the (free) matplotlib gallery (http://matplotlib.org/gallery.html) which also has plenty of very good examples, and I can imagine that it is a tough job as an author to add additional value to that.

What this book does very well is introducing matplotlib quite gently in the first chapter, which makes it quite attractive for Python & matplotlib beginners. But also here, we have the alternative free user guide available online http://matplotlib.org/contents.html

My main point of criticism why I find the matplotlib.org resources more accessible might be that they are actually in color: the plot and the code syntax. Unfortunately, the book only uses colors throughout the first chapter (and very very rarely for a handful of other plots later on), so that the largest portion of the plots are in gray-scale - also no syntax highlighting throughout this book. Since I have the ebook version, I do not fully understand why there is no coloring throughout the other chapters (especially the 2nd chapter, which is called "Chapter 2: Customizing Colors and Styles").

But overall, it covers matplotlib pretty well, and I'd recommend it as an alternative to the resources matplotlib.org.

But to it's defense, my hard copy of the "Gnuplot in Action" is also presented in gray-scales, and the "R Graphic's cookbook" also only makes use of colors rather sparingly. However, I think, nowadays in 2014 I'd at least expect the ebook to be in color - especially if you want to make it more attractive than the freely available online resources.

Not a real point of criticism but more like a suggestion for future editions: as big fan of it, I was actually looking for this section that mentions how to use it in IPython notebooks (%pylab inline vs. matplotlib inline), and maybe also plotly for additional value :)

4 people found this helpful

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Ty Sid

quick recipes, easy to follow

Reviewed in the United States on June 2, 2014

This book has a useful collection of examples for many common use cases that a developer would need in working with Matplotlib. It is written in an easy to follow style that makes it suitable for Python developers that are starting out with Matplotlib. It is not a Python tutorial in any way, but a minimal knowledge of Python is sufficient to understand the code and the examples. I'm relatively new to Python but have significant programming experience in other languages and had no difficulty in picking up the various tools that are presented in the book. Each example comes with complete code listings that just work without any modifications, so one can easily see what is happening with that code. The eBook version comes with code files for all the examples in the book that can be downloaded directly from the Publisher's website (Packt Publishing).

I had a bare minimum exposure to Matplotlib but I did not feel that I need to separately following any other tutorial to learn any particular tools. IMO, the given examples provide a better understanding of the most useful tools by seeing them in action and trying them out on your own.

The last chapter on User Interfaces covers creating interactive plots using Tkinter, wxWidgets, GTK, etc, which is helpful in bringing the plots to an audience in a way that makes it easier to explain and clarify the data being considered.

I would recommend the Matplotlib Plotting Cookbook to people starting out with Matplotlib who want to get up to speed quickly. It's also useful as a quick reference for experienced developers since many common use cases are covered. The index and the table of contents make it simple to find any particular use case.

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Sanjay Dasgupta

I would have liked wider coverage of the plotting API

Reviewed in India on April 28, 2016

Verified Purchase

The book did not meet my needs. I would have liked wider coverage of the plotting API, and found the content barely more than a elementary introduction to the first few steps.

I think book authors should understand that when someone opts to buy a book (instead of heading over to the online API), they are expecting the book to contain a fair bit of information about the API.

Antonio L. B. Squadri

Five stars

Reviewed in Brazil on November 30, 2017

Verified Purchase

Excellent book. I found in him a rare objectivity and unusual clarity in computer books. You will be able to develop many scripts.

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