The previous sections covered some heavy material, and it can be sometimes difficult to remember the big picture when examining the details under the proverbial microscope. As a preventative measure, we'd like to bring the discussion back to a macroscopic scale as it relates to knowledge acquisition.

The three layers that we've talked about in matplotlib's architecture are the backend, artist, and the scripting layers. As an intermediate user of matplotlib, you've very likely used all the three layers. However, you've most probably spent a lot of of time on the scripting layer with pyplot. This is where most users of matplotlib not only start, but usually stay. The introductory material in this book focuses on getting the users up to speed with the scripting layer so that they can be as effective as possible. Intermediate materials (such as the books for reference mentioned earlier in the chapter) also focus on this.

An in-depth usage...