Hands-on Matplotlib

by Ashwin Pajankar

Learn the core aspects of NumPy, Matplotlib, and Pandas, and use them to write programs with Python 3. This book focuses heavily on various data visualization techniques and will help you acquire expert-level knowledge of working with Matplotlib, a MATLAB-style plotting library for Python programming language that provides an object-oriented API for embedding plots into applications.
You'll begin with an introduction to Python 3 and the scientific Python ecosystem. Next, you'll explore NumPy and ndarray data structures, creation routines, and data visualization. You'll examine useful concepts related to style sheets, legends, and layouts, followed by line, bar, and scatter plots. Chapters then cover recipes of histograms, contours, streamplots, and heatmaps, and how to visualize images and audio with pie and polar charts.
Moving forward, you'll learn how to visualize with pcolor, pcolormesh, and colorbar, and how to visualize in 3D in Matplotlib, create simple animations, and embed Matplotlib with different frameworks. The concluding chapters cover how to visualize data with Pandas and Matplotlib, Seaborn, and how to work with the real-life data and visualize it. After reading Hands-on Matplotlib you'll be proficient with Matplotlib and able to comfortably work with ndarrays in NumPy and data frames in Pandas.
What You'll Learn
Understand Data Visualization and Python using Matplotlib
Review the fundamental data structures in NumPy and Pandas
Work with 3D plotting, visualizations, and animations
Visualize images and audio data
Who This Book Is For
Data scientists, machine learning engineers and software professionals with basic programming skills.

320 pages, Paperback

Published November 28, 2021

Reviews

[Frank · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good book, but it doesn't explain everything shown to you. For example, to generate data points to be used to plot a graph, the book used np.random.randn(10000), but it never explained what randn( ) is. It just tells you that it will generate normally distributed values. What it does is generate the z-scores from a standard normal distribution, i.e. mean of 0 and standard deviation of 1. I had to ask ChatGPT for an explanation.

I first learned Matplotlib from the W3 site and went to this book for some finer details, such as including error bars. That is how I recommend you use this book, that is, as a supplement.

[Johnny · Rating 1 out of 5]

A big disappointment. It takes 3 chapters to get to Matplotlib, then follows the basic parts of Matplotlib that every tutorial covers and as soon as it starts to get interesting, the book reaches its end.