External resources¶
One of the strength of matplotlib is the extensive documentation available from the website. But there is also a large set of external resources that are incredibly useful when you’re looking to design a specific figure:
The matplotlib documentation is the primary source of information whenever you need to know the parameters of this or that function. It has also a very well written set of tutorials that are worth to be read:
The starter guide helps you to get started with Matplotlib
The pyplot tutorial is an introduction to the pyplot interface
The image tutorial explains the basic of image display
The catalogue shows some neat and standard visualizations
The frequently asked questions are worth a read
Online help is available from two mailing lists (users and developers) and from stack overflow which has a dedicated matplotlib tag and a lot of questions have been asked and answered:
Stack overflow (more than 40,000 questions related to matplotlib)
There exist various galleries online among which the matplotlib gallery that is probably the best gallery to start with. The other galleries are worth a look because they explain the rationale for each kind of plot:
The Matplotlib Gallery is probably the best resource if you’re looking for how to do a specific figure. Just search for the closest example and get the code.
The Data Visualization Catalogue is a project developed by Severino Ribecca to create a library of different information visualisation types.
The Python Graph gallery displays hundreds of charts and aims to showcase the awesome dataviz possibilities of Python.
The R Graph Gallery is a collection of charts made displayed in several sections, always with their (R) reproducible code available.
Finally, there exists many books about matplotlib and data visualization. I selected only a few of them that are well written and open access. You can find them in the chap-bibliography appendix.