Chapter 2. Getting Started with Matplotlib

In the previous chapter, we have given a brief introduction to Matplotlib. We now want to start using it for real—after all, that's what you are reading this book for.

In this chapter, we will:

• Explore the basic plotting capabilities of Matplotlib for single or multiple lines

• Add information to the plots such as legends, axis labels, and titles

• Save a plot to a file

• Describe the interaction with IPython

• Customize Matplotlib, both through configuration files and Python code

Let's start looking at some graphs.

First plots with Matplotlib

One of the strong points of Matplotlib is how quickly we can start producing plots out of the box. Here is our first example:

$ ipython
In [1]: import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
In [2]: plt.plot([1, 3, 2, 4])
Out[2]: [<matplotlib.lines.Line2D object at 0x2544f10>]
In [3]: plt.show()

This code snippet gives the output shown in the following screenshot:

As you can see, we are using IPython. This will be the case throughout...