Book Image

Matplotlib for Python Developers

Book Image

Matplotlib for Python Developers

Overview of this book

Providing appealing plots and graphs is an essential part of various fields such as scientific research, data analysis, and so on. Matplotlib, the Python 2D plotting library, is used to produce publication-quality figures in a variety of hardcopy formats and interactive environments across platforms. This book explains creating various plots, histograms, power spectra, bar charts, error charts, scatter-plots and much more using the powerful Matplotlib library to get impressive out-of-the-box results. This book gives you a comprehensive tour of the key features of the Matplotlib Python 2D plotting library, right from the simplest concepts to the most advanced topics. You will discover how easy it is to produce professional-quality plots when you have this book to hand. The book introduces the library in steps. First come the basics: introducing what the library is, its important prerequisites (and terminology), installing and configuring Matplotlib, and going through simple plots such as lines, grids, axes, and charts. Then we start with some introductory examples, and move ahead by discussing the various programming styles that Matplotlib allows, and several key features. Further, the book presents an important section on embedding applications. You will be introduced to three of the best known GUI libraries 'GTK+, Qt, and wxWidgets' and presented with the steps to implement to include Matplotlib in an application written using each of them. You will learn through an incremental approach: from a simple example that presents the peculiarities of the GUI library, to more complex ones, using GUI designer tools. Because the Web permeates all of our activities, a part of the book is dedicated to showing how Matplotlib can be used in a web environment, and another section focuses on using Matplotlib with common Python web frameworks, namely, Pylons and Django. Last, but not least, you will go through real-world examples, where you will see some real situations in which you can use Matplotlib.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Matplotlib for Python Developers
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Chapter 9. Matplotlib in the Real World

In this chapter you will see several examples of Matplotlib usage in real-world situations, showing some of the common cases where we can use Matplotlib to draw a plot of some values.

There is a common workflow for this kind of job:

  1. 1. Identify the best data source for the information we want to plot

  2. 2. Extract the data of interest and elaborate it for plotting

  3. 3. Plot the data

Usually, the hardest part is to extract and prepare the data for plotting. Due to this, we are going to show several examples of the first two steps.

The examples are:

  • Plotting data from a database

  • Plotting data from a web page

  • Plotting the data extracted by parsing an Apache log file

  • Plotting the data read from a comma-separated values (CSV) file

  • Plotting extrapolated data using curve fitting

  • Third-party tools using Matplotlib (NetworkX and mpmath)

  • Plotting geographical data using Basemap

Let's begin

Plotting data from a database

Databases often tend to collect much more information than we...