Congratulations to my friend Philipp Janert on the release of his book Gnuplot In Action!
If you’ve ever wanted to use gnuplot, but were intimidated by the manpage…. Now’s you chance. gnuplot is super handy for wading through raw data and trying to find trends. There are lots of whiz bang JavaScript libraries like flot or Timeplot, but using them assumes you know what the heck your plotting.
Typically you’ll have some data files and then you can use gnuplot interactively to visualize a data set and figure out what kind of graph would be the most appropriate way to present your data to others.
gnuplot runs on all platform and can output to many different formats. It’s a very handy tool especially when used on a unix based OS where you can grep, cut, and sed your way to variation of data files very quickly and replot the new information.