Basic Beginners’ Introduction to plotting in Python（基本入门介绍。策划在Python中）.pdf

Basic Beginners’ Introduction to plotting in Python Sarah Blyth July 23, 2009 1 Introduction Welcome to a very short introduction on getting started with plotting in Python! I would highly recommend that you refer to the official Matplotlib documentation which can be found at: /contents.html. You can also download the Matplotlib manual from the Astronomy Department Vula repository (faster) or directly from the Matplotlib website (slower). There are all sorts of examples and further very important and useful details listed and explained there. The aim of this document is merely to start you off on Day 1 - how to make a plot from scratch. 2 Getting started - what do you need? You need to have the following installed on your computer to be able to make nice plots. • Python • Numpy - this is the module which does most array and mathematical manip- ulation • Matplotlib - this is the module you will be using for plotting You can check these are installed by going to a terminal and typing: $ python import numpy as np import pylab as pl If you get no errors, then they are installed. If they are not installed, speak to the department SysAdmin to help you install them. You can also check which versions you have installed by doing: 1 $ python import numpy numpy.__version__ The output you get should look something like: ’1.2.1’ Typing: import matplotlib matplotlib.__version__ should give you something like: ’’ 3 Basic plots Two basic plot types which you will find are used very often are (x,y) line and scatter plots and histograms. Some code for making these two types of plots is included in this section. 3.1 Line and scatter plots 3.1.1 Line plots A common type of graph to plot is a l