General information about RCS Python Workshops can be found in the Python Workshops Repository. This includes information about software installations and general Python resources.
The pandas workshop covers plotting pandas data frames directly, but sometimes you need to go beyond the defaults, especially to make publication-quality graphics.
matplotlib is the core data visualization library in Python.
pandas plotting is built on matplotlib, as are additional visualization libraries like Seaborn. For R users, there's a version of ggplot for Python too. There are specialty toolkits that build on matplotlib for tasks like geospatial visualization, but many require extra software installations, so we don't use them here.
Bokeh is for interactive visualizations, as is Plotly.
There are other packages too.
You can download all of the files by clicking the green button above and choosing "Download ZIP."
If you download files from the links above, you have to click through to the RAW version of the notebook and download that. If you download directly from the links above, the files won't open because they are web pages, not the raw files.
To download exercise/workshop files, right-click on the links below, and choose Save Link As (or the similar option in your browser). Make sure to choose All file types as the content type, or remove any .txt or similar extensions from the file when you save it. The files should be *.ipynb files, with no additional file type extensions.
On a Mac, to open the files in Jupyter Notebook, start Jupyter Notebook from the folder where you saved the files. On Windows, navigate to the directory within Jupyter Notebook.
Workshop File; if you only download this file, you'll be missing some linked image files
Some general Python resources that cover multiple topics can be found in our Python Resource List. Additional visualization-specific resources include:
matplotlib Tutorial from UC Boulder Research Computing
Python Plotting for Exploratory Data Analysis: examples of plots frequently used when exploring data
The Python Graph Gallery provides example plots with the code to make them; spans across different visualization libraries
Data Visualization: from Non-Coder to Coder by Alexis Cook; visualization tutorial/course aimed at those new to programming