Gnuplot in Action

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1: Prelude - What is Graphical Analysis?
• Chapter 2: Essential Gnuplot
• Chapter 3: Woking With Data
• Chapter 4: Practical Matters
• Chapter 5: Doing it With Style
• Chapter 6: Decorations and Appearances
• Chapter 7: All about Axes
• Chapter 8: Three-Dimensional Plots
• Chapter 9: Color
• Chapter 10: Advanced Plots
• Chapter 11: Terminals and Output Options
• Chapter 12: Scripting and Macros
• Chapter 13: Graphs and Their Applications
• Chapter 14: Techniques of Graphical Analysis
• Chapter 15: Epilogue: Why Graphical Analysis?
• Appendix A: Obtaining, Compiling, and Installing Gnuplot
• Appendix B: Gnuplot Command and Options Reference
• Appendix C: Resources

This book provides the first comprehensive introduction to Gnuplot, the most popular open source data visualization program.

The book assumes no previous knowledge of either Gnuplot nor statistical analysis. It introduces the most basic concepts rapidly, to enable the reader to get started and be productive quickly. After basics have been established, the book moves on to explain gnuplot's advanced concepts and power features in detail. Particular attention is paid to those areas that have proven to be difficult to grasp, or are poorly explained in the existing documentation.

The books starts out with basic gnuplot concepts, then describes in depth how to get a graph ready for final presentation and to make it look "just right", by including arrows, labels, and other decorations. Next come advanced concepts, such as multi-dimensional graphs and false-color plots - powerful features for special purposes. We also talk about advanced applications of gnuplot: for instance, we will describe how to script gnuplot, so that it can run unattended as a batch job, and how to call gnuplot from within a CGI script to generate graphics for dynamic websites on demand. In the final part of this book, the reader will learn how to apply gnuplot to several actual data analysis problems. We will take a look at different types of graphs that can be generated with gnuplot and will discuss when and how to use them to extract actual information from data.

One of the main advantages of gnuplot over competing products/programs (such as SAS, R, or S-Plus) is that it does neither require programming skills, nor knowledge of advanced mathematical or statistical concepts. In line with that, most of the text should be accessible to anyone, and we emphasize the use of graphical (as opposed to statistical) methods to gain information from data.

The book is suitable for readers entirely new to gnuplot, as well as for current gnuplot users, who know some gnuplot, but wish to attain full mastery of its possibilities. As an added bonus for these readers, the book contains a collection of "nuggets" - hands-on explanations of surprisingly nifty effects that make everyone say: "How did you do that?".