Book Image

Matplotlib for Python Developers - Second Edition

By : Aldrin Yim, Claire Chung, Allen Yu
Book Image

Matplotlib for Python Developers - Second Edition

By: Aldrin Yim, Claire Chung, Allen Yu

Overview of this book

Python is a general-purpose programming language increasingly being used for data analysis and visualization. Matplotlib is a popular data visualization package in Python used to design effective plots and graphs. This is a practical, hands-on resource to help you visualize data with Python using the Matplotlib library. Matplotlib for Python Developers, Second Edition shows you how to create attractive graphs, charts, and plots using Matplotlib. You will also get a quick introduction to third-party packages, Seaborn, Pandas, Basemap, and Geopandas, and learn how to use them with Matplotlib. After that, you’ll embed and customize your plots in third-party tools such as GTK+3, Qt 5, and wxWidgets. You’ll also be able to tweak the look and feel of your visualization with the help of practical examples provided in this book. Further on, you’ll explore Matplotlib 2.1.x on the web, from a cloud-based platform using third-party packages such as Django. Finally, you will integrate interactive, real-time visualization techniques into your current workflow with the help of practical real-world examples. By the end of this book, you’ll be thoroughly comfortable with using the popular Python data visualization library Matplotlib 2.1.x and leveraging its power to build attractive, insightful, and powerful visualizations.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Typical API data formats


Many websites distribute data via their API, which bridges applications via standardized architecture. While we are not going to cover the details of using APIs here, we will cover the most common API data exchange formats, namely CSV and JSON.

Note

Interested readers can visit site-specific documentations for the use of APIs.

We have briefly covered parsing of CSV files in Chapter 4Advanced Matplotlib. To aid your understanding, we are going to represent the same data using both CSV and JSON.

CSV

Comma-separated values (CSV) is one of the oldest file formats, introduced long before the World Wide Web even existed. However, it is now becoming deprecated as other advanced formats such as JSON and XML are gaining popularity. As the name suggests, data values are separated by commas. The preinstalled csv package and the pandas package contain classes to read and write data in CSV format. The following CSV example defines a population table with two countries:

Country,Time...