Creating two-dimensional plots of functions and data

This recipe presents the basic kind of plot generated by Matplotlib: a two-dimensional display, with axes, where datasets and functional relationships are represented by lines. Besides the data being displayed, a good graph will contain a title (caption), axes labels, and, perhaps, a legend identifying each line in the plot.

Getting ready

Start Jupyter and run the following commands in an execution cell:

%matplotlib inline
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

How to do it…

Run the following code in a single Jupyter cell:

xvalues = np.linspace(-np.pi, np.pi)
yvalues1 = np.sin(xvalues)
yvalues2 = np.cos(xvalues)
plt.plot(xvalues, yvalues1, lw=2, color='red',
         label='sin(x)')
plt.plot(xvalues, yvalues2, lw=2, color='blue',
         label='cos(x)')
plt.title('Trigonometric Functions')
plt.xlabel('x')
plt.ylabel('sin(x), cos(x)')
plt.axhline(0, lw=0.5, color='black')
plt.axvline(0, lw=0.5, color='black')
plt.legend()
None

This...