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Visualization Resources

Visualization Books

  • Wilke, Claus, Fundamentals of Data Visualization
    The book has code available using R, but the principles are language-agnostic.

  • Tufte, Edward

    • The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
    • Envisioning Information
    • Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative
    • Beautiful Evidence

  • O'Reilly books on Python and Visualization
    These books are available online for free by logging in through the campus library.

  • VanderPlas, Jake Python Data Science Handbook
    This general book introduces broad topics in Data Science including basic visualizations using the pandas, numpy, and matplotlib libraries.

Python Libraries

  • matplotlib - matplotlib is the original data visualization library for Python. The functions closely match to plotting function in MATLAB.
    Many other libraries work with matplotlib, e.g., pandas and seaborn integrate with matplotlib and give access to the methods.

  • seaborn - seaborn is built on top of matplotlib, but is designed to have a more modern look to the plots created.

  • Plotnine - Plotnine is an implementation of ggplot2, R's plotting package, in Python. Similar to how MATLAB user's may initially gravitate to using matplotlib in Python, R user's may want to use Plotnine for visualization.

  • Bokeh - Bokeh is also based on the ideas of Grammar of Graphics (like ggplot2 and Plotnine), but it has been created from the ground up in Python.
    Bokeh provides the ability to create interactive, web-ready plots.

  • Plotly - Plotly is well-known as an online platform for data visualization, but it can also be used in a Python notebook. Like Bokeh, Plotly can make interactive plots.

  • Gleam - Gleam is a library that takes its ideas from R's Shiny package. Gleam allows the creation of interactive web apps.

  • Altair - Altair is a declarative visualization library (similar to seaborn), but is not wrapped around matplotlib.

  • Folium - Folium combines python and mapping with leaflet.js to visualize geospatial data.