Preface

The best data is the data that we can see and understand. As developers and data scientists, we want to create and build the most comprehensive and understandable visualizations. It is not always simple; we need to find the data, read it, clean it, filter it, and then use the right tool to visualize it. This book explains the process of how to read, clean, and visualize the data into information with straight and simple (and sometimes not so simple) recipes.

How to read local data, remote data, CSV, JSON, and data from relational databases are all explained in this book.

Some simple plots can be plotted with one simple line in Python using matplotlib, but performing more advanced charting requires knowledge of more than just Python. We need to understand information theory and human perception aesthetics to produce the most appealing visualizations.

This book will explain some practices behind plotting with matplotlib in Python, statistics used, and usage examples for different charting features that we should use in an optimal way.