On Tue, 2008-12-16 at 21:24 -0800, John Poelstra wrote:

Are there any recommended books on representing data in graphs or charts with Python? If not, what are the currently recommended libraries to graph data with?

Thanks, John

Googling for

Python graphing

led me to

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2005-May/321907.html

which inspired me to narrow my search to

python graphing blt

because I have memories of liking BLT in the TCL/TK world some long time ago.

That 2nd google search led me to:

http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~hpl/Pmw.Blt/doc/

which looks pretty good to me, but I confess up front that I haven't tried it.

Your question about charts leaves me unsure if I'm even on the right track in answering your question. You mean charts in the sense of a tabular presentation of the data? Python can handle that at least as well as Cobol. But that's obvious enough to make me think that you are perhaps looking for something more general about presenting data. There are many good books on that topic, none of them, to my knowledge, python specific.

Google for

presenting data books

or you could try narrowing it down with

presenting data books tukey

Or are you looking for something to do the kinds of tricks that once upon a time were the realm of the Unix tool tbl? Generating HTML tables or even TeX tables and post-processing the output would seem to be the contemporary ways to do that.

Googling for

python html table

gives me the impression that the harder problem is scraping the data out of an HTML table to get it into Python data structures (which I think is the opposite of the problem we're talking about here), but I did find:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2986

which specifically explains how to use the Python library HTMLgen to generate an HTML table. (It took me a little while to figure out that the red text in that article are clickable links to see the code listings and output examples). The bar chart from listing 2 in that article certainly looks to me like nice looking output from very little code.

Maybe I should shush and listen to what other more experienced hands have to say in reply to your question.

Can you tell us more of the specific problem that motivates your question? Might help me narrow my thinking and searching down to something more specific.

Drew

On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 8:24 PM, John Poelstra poelstra@redhat.com wrote:

Are there any recommended books on representing data in graphs or charts with Python? If not, what are the currently recommended libraries to graph data with?

I do all my scientific data plotting with python-matplotlib currently

http://www.scipy.org/Cookbook/Matplotlib

-jef

On Tue, 2008-12-16 at 21:24 -0800, John Poelstra wrote:

Are there any recommended books on representing data in graphs or charts with Python? If not, what are the currently recommended libraries to graph data with?

Graphs are done with pydot, charts with python-matplotlib.