As developers, you probably recognize the importance of reading documentation and manuals to get acquainted with syntax and functionality. We would like to reiterate the importance of reading the library documentation and encourage you to do the same. You can find the documentation here: https://matplotlib.org. On the official Matplotlib website, you would find the documentation for each function, news of latest releases and ongoing development, and a list of third-party packages, as well as tutorials and galleries of example plots.

However, building advanced and sophisticated plots by reading through documentation from scratch means a much steeper learning curve and a lot more time spent, especially when the documentation is regularly updated for better comprehension. This book aims to provide the reader with a guided road-map to accelerate the learning process, save time and effort, and put theory into practice. The online manuals can serve as the atlases you can turn to whenever you want to explore further.

The Matplotlib source code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib. We encourage our readers to fork it and add their ideas!