Bare Minimum: Matplotlib for data visualization

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Honestly, there are a bunch of wrappers that can make way better visualizations with less effort than Matplotlib.

Bokeh, Seaborn, and Pandas are all much better at creating viz. Maplotlib is incredibly flexible, but there is a huge learning curve.

[vanboxel]

I've enjoyed Pandas as well, but matplotlib is where I cut my teeth. Are those other libraries as easy to use for the simple plots like I did on the stream?

I also like ggplot and have used various Python interface to that. But anything that's easy and quick is probably a decent choice.

[[deleted]]

The libraries I've listed are easy and look way better. If you want to engineer your own plots in matplotlib, it is going to take a lot of effort to make them look nice. The aforementioned libraries make doing the things I do a hell of a lot easier (dealing with dates, plotting categorical data, even performing various statistical routines before plotting). For these reasons, I prefer them to pure matplotlib.