First of all, what is Matplotlib?

Matplotlib is one of the most used libraries in Python used for data visualization. Despite being comprehensive by allowing the creation of all kinds of static, animated, and interactive visualizations, it is actually quite easy to use. On top of that, matplotlib is open source, which is indeed great.

We believe that starting learning visualization in Python with matplotlib is the best option, since most of the other visualization libraries in Python are built on top of it.

Before diving into matplotlib let's have a look at an example of the plot created with its help:

Looks pretty neat, doesn't it? What if I tell you that this plot can be created with just a few lines of code?  Moreover, we can even go as far as making it interactive. That's the power of matplotlib. 

Now without further ado let's go to our first task in this course. The majority of matplotlib utilities are located within the pyplot submodule, hence we will use it further in the course.