John passed away tragically young at age 44, in 2012, and matplotlib is now a full-fledged community effort, developed and maintained by a host of others. Hunter, a neurobiologist, began developing matplotlib around 2003, originally inspired to emulate commands from Mathworks’ MATLAB software. Let’s start with a bit of history: John D.

Remove ads Pylab: What Is It, and Should I Use It? So, before we get to any glitzy examples, it’s useful to grasp the core concepts of matplotlib’s design. The library is still evolving, and many older examples floating around online may take 70% fewer lines of code in their modern version.

While it is comprehensive, some of matplotlib’s own public documentation is seriously out-of-date.

(Backends deal with the process of how charts are actually rendered, not just structured internally.)

Matplotlib is home to several different interfaces (ways of constructing a figure) and capable of interacting with a handful of different backends.

The library itself is huge, at something like 70,000 total lines of code.

But the following issues can cause some challenges: The problem is not that matplotlib’s documentation is lacking: the documentation is actually extensive. Learning matplotlib can be a frustrating process at times. If you don’t already have matplotlib installed, see here for a walkthrough before proceeding. We’ll mainly use the numpy.random module to generate “toy” data, drawing samples from different statistical distributions. This article assumes the user knows a tiny bit of NumPy.

Plotting with the pandas + matplotlib combinationįree Bonus: Click here to download 5 Python + Matplotlib examples with full source code that you can use as a basis for making your own plots and graphics.

While learning by example can be tremendously insightful, it helps to have even just a surface-level understanding of the library’s inner workings and layout as well. This article is a beginner-to-intermediate-level walkthrough on matplotlib that mixes theory with examples. Using one-liners to generate basic plots in matplotlib is fairly simple, but skillfully commanding the remaining 98% of the library can be daunting.

However, matplotlib is also a massive library, and getting a plot to look just right is often achieved through trial and error. Watch it together with the written tutorial to deepen your understanding: Python Plotting With MatplotlibĪ picture is worth a thousand words, and with Python’s matplotlib library, it fortunately takes far less than a thousand words of code to create a production-quality graphic. Watch Now This tutorial has a related video course created by the Real Python team.

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