Chapter 1. Prelude: Understanding data with gnuplot

This chapter covers

  • Warm-up examples
  • What is graphical analysis?
  • What is gnuplot?

Gnuplot is probably the most widely used open source program for plotting and visualizing data. In this book, I want to show you how to use gnuplot to make plots and graphs of your data: both quick and easy graphs for your own use and highly polished graphs for presentations and publications.

But I also want to show you something else: how to solve data analysis problems using graphical methods. The art of discovering relationships in data and extracting information from it by visual means is called graphical analysis and I believe gnuplot to be an excellent tool for it.

As a teaser, let’s take a look at some ...

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