Visualisation of data is the bread and butter of data analysis and science communication. Like the old saying of a painting, a plot can condense a 1000 words into a neat image.

The most popular graphing package for Python, and the one that will be used in this book, is Matplotlib. It is heavily integrated into other SciPy packages and allows for us to easily transform our Numpy array into images.

Other plotting packages include:

• Seaborn - A plotting package for statistical graphics. Built on top of Matplotlib. [BSD-3 Clause]
• Plotly - A modern web-focused plotting library. [MIT]
• Gnuplot - The classic unix plotting program. Requires piping data from python to an external program. [gnuplot]