Introduction

Nowadays, people may think Gnuplot is an old, awkward graphing utility. Pace to those comments, I still enjoy the flexibility brought by gnuplot.

In the Unix tradition, gnuplot is a simple tool, doing (mostly) one thing, and doing it very, very well.

In this book, I would like to reinvent the wheels by reintroducing the tutorial of Matplotlib.

Disclaimer: I have to admit that Python is great, and Matplotlib is powerful. So this book is intended to serve as a reference for people who want to try something new.

Matplotlib can be well integrated with other awesome libraries (e.g., numpy and pandas) in Python, so it is user-friendly for Python developers and researchers, especially in the domain of machine learning. On the other hand, many developers and researchers just want to plot and visualize their experimental results. To this end, a lightweight plot utility is in demand, and I think gnuplot is born to do so.

Data and code of this book can be found in GitHub.