graphing books

[R. Drew Davis]

On Tue, 2008-12-16 at 21:24 -0800, John Poelstra wrote:
> Are there any recommended books on representing data in graphs or charts 
> with Python?  If not, what are the currently recommended libraries to 
> graph data with?
> 
> Thanks,
> John

Googling for

	Python graphing

led me to 

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2005-May/321907.html

which inspired me to narrow my search to

	python graphing blt

because I have memories of liking BLT in the TCL/TK world some long time
ago.

That 2nd google search led me to:

http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~hpl/Pmw.Blt/doc/

which looks pretty good to me, but I confess up front that I haven't
tried it.

Your question about charts leaves me unsure if I'm even on the right
track in answering your question.  You mean charts in the sense of a
tabular presentation of the data?  Python can handle that at least as
well as Cobol.  But that's obvious enough to make me think that you are
perhaps looking for something more general about presenting data.
There are many good books on that topic, none of them, to my knowledge,
python specific.

Google for 

        presenting data books
        
or you could try narrowing it down with

        presenting data books tukey
        
Or are you looking for something to do the kinds of tricks that once
upon a time were the realm of the Unix tool tbl?  Generating HTML tables
or even TeX tables and post-processing the output would seem to be the
contemporary ways to do that.

Googling for

	python html table

gives me the impression that the harder problem is scraping the data out
of an HTML table to get it into Python data structures (which I think is
the opposite of the problem we're talking about here), but I did find:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2986

which specifically explains how to use the Python library HTMLgen to
generate an HTML table.  (It took me a little while to figure out that
the red text in that article are clickable links to see the code
listings and output examples).  The bar chart from listing 2 in that
article certainly looks to me like nice looking output from very little
code.

Maybe I should shush and listen to what other more experienced hands
have to say in reply to your question.

Can you tell us more of the specific problem that motivates your
question?   Might help me narrow my thinking and searching down to
something more specific.

Drew