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

Creating animated plot


Matplotlib was not designed as an animation package from the get-go, and thus it would appear sluggish in some advanced usages. For animation-centric applications, PyGame is a very good alternative (https://www.pygame.org) which supports OpenGL- and Direct3D-accelerated graphics for the ultimate speed in animating objects. Nevertheless, Matplotlib has acceptable performance most of the time, and we will guide you through the steps to create animations that are more engaging than static plots.

Before we start making animations, we need to install either FFmpeg, avconv, mencoder, or ImageMagick on our system. These additional dependencies are not bundled with Matplotlib, and thus we need to install them separately. We are going to walk you through the steps of installing FFmpeg.

For Debian-based Linux users, FFmpeg can be installed by simply issuing the following command in Terminal.

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

For Mac users, Homebrew (https://brew.sh/) is the simplest way...