Beginning Python Visualization

book review: Beginning Python Visualization

In my quest to learn enough python to sufficiently learn to write a sudoku solver, I have also made it my quest to finish all of the Python books that have been lying around my apartment half-finshed for months if not years.  This book is one of those.  And its a shame it took me so long because I really enjoyed this book.  The title of the book is a bit misleading because only small parts of it are actually about visualization and the majority seemed to be real-world uses of python.  Still, that is realevant and I learned a fair amount about processing text files and data organization.  The bulk of the visualization covers PIL and matplotlib.  As someone coming from an R background, the dynamic nature of matplotlib was like a breath of fresh air compared to the more static standard R plot.  The book was full of lots of seemingly unrelated items (the last chapter was pretty much only random items) and most of these were pretty interesting/relevant such as Magic Squares.  I am curious to play around with magic squares and hope to return to it in a later post.