Data importing and basic plots

Equipped with a crash course on the Mathematica programming language, we can really start having some fun with data. The rest of the chapter will teach us how to load simple datasets and plot some values. We will learn about a few different kinds of plots and the methods of styling and customizing them.

Importing data into Mathematica

Mathematica provides a very rich data importing and exporting suite. The two commonly used functions to load data into a worksheet are Import and ReadList. In this section, we will use Import to load a dataset into Mathematica and plot it. We will style our plot, and explore some features of plotting functions that are useful.

SetDirectory[] and NotebookDirectory[]

To load our dataset, we need to tell Mathematica where to look for it. The structure of the code and data provided in the accompanying book's website follow the same pattern for every chapter. Under each chapter folder, there is a folder called data. The folder chapter2...