In the world of Python development, there are many libraries for charts (Matplotlib and Plotly being a few examples), and cookbook-style books have been written for many of them. Since this is an introduction to data charting, we need a simple, easy-to-use library where developers new to Python charting, or Python charting in general, could easily take code from this book and build Python applications. The following screenshot shows the pygal website with some chart examples:

This is where pygal comes in; pygal (http://pygal.org/) is a Python-based SVG Charts Creator, developed by the Kozea Community (http://community.kozea.fr/), as shown in the following screenshot. This is a group dedicated to building quality open source libraries (mainly Python based, but for HTML5 projects as well).

The pygal library offers multiple charting options beyond what I consider standard charts: bar charts, line charts, and pie graphs. It includes a world map, funnel charts, radar charts, and...