A significant aspect of gaining matplotlib mastery is familiarizing oneself with the use of the other Python tools in the scientific programming ecosystem. Libraries such as NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, or SymPy are just the beginning. The tools available in the community cover an enormous amount of ground, entailing the spectrum of many fields and subspecialties. Projects such as scikit-learn, AstroPy, h5py, and so on, build upon the foundations provided by others, thus being able to provide more functionality quicker than, if they had to start from scratch themselves.

Those who may want to look more deeply into these and other tools may benefit from a guided tour into one area that could serve as a template for future exploration into many other areas. This is our mission in this chapter, with our entry points for further examination being the following: