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About the Book

About

This book is written for frustrated and reluctant matplotlib users who care about crafting good data visuals. Matplotlib can be a blank canvas, offering more room for customization than you might find in Microsoft Excel, and offers the advantages of reproducibility and automation that come from working with Python. Still, becoming comfortable with matplotlib requires a lot of patience. I wrote this book to help make that easier and put some essentials in one place.

This book itself doesn't show you how to make particular chart types. The idea is you already have a bar chart, line plot, histogram, etc, but that it's ugly. The book helps you figure out how to beautify your charts and helps make those steps seem less mysterious.

GitHub

Find more, code and demos, on the accompanying GitHub repo.

Contents (not all included in current draft)

1. The Object-oriented Interface
2. Axes Appearance, Ticks, and Grids
3. Elements and Coordinate Systems
4. Text and Titles
5. Dates
6. Colors
7. Multiple Axes and Plots
8. Style and Configuration
9. Math Interlude
10. Math Interlude - Applications
11. Artist Objects
12. Artist Objects - Applications
13. Special Topics - Multi-dimensional Scaling
14. Special Topics - Intro Stats Graphs
15. Special Topics - Ternary Plots

About the Author

Alexander Clark

@ale_xanderclark

I'm on the Economic Graph Research and Insights Team at LinkedIn. I teach on the side. I earned a PhD in economics with a focus on microeconomic theory.

Get in touch with me through LinkedIn.