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

Scraping information from websites


Governments or jurisdictions around the world are increasingly embracing the importance of open data, which aims to increase citizen involvement and informed decision-making, and also aims to make policies more open to public scrutiny. Some examples of open data initiatives around the world include https://www.data.gov/ (United States of America), https://data.gov.uk/ (United Kingdom), and https://data.gov.hk/en/ (Hong Kong).

These data portals often provide an API for programmatic access of data. However, an API is not available for some datasets, hence we need to rely on good old web scraping techniques to extract information from websites.

Beautiful Soup (https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/) is an incredibly useful package for scraping information from websites. Basically, everything marked with an HTML tag can be scraped with this wonderful package. Scrapy is also a good package for web scraping, but it is more like a framework for writing...