Setting up the plotting environment

Matplotlib is a Python package for data visualization. To get ourselves ready for Matplotlib plotting, we need to set up Python, install Matplotlib with its dependencies, as well as prepare a platform to execute and keep our running code. While Matplotlib provides a native GUI interface, we recommend using Jupyter Notebook. It allows us to run our code interactively while keeping the code, output figures, and any notes tidy. We will walk you through the setup procedure in this session.