The Alogus Research Corporation

About the author

Lee Phillips is a physicist and author who has been using gnuplot for 30 years. This is his second book about it. You can find his articles about science and computing in Ars Technica, LWN, and elsewhere. He has tried many other graphing programs, but still thinks that gnuplot is the best.

Visual Index

All the book’s over 400 graphs are collected in a visual index. Just find the one you want and click on it to see how to make it.

Why this book?

Gnuplot can do so much, and is so customizable, that it can be hard to find out how to get it to do what you want. This guide is written by a scientist who has used gnuplot for 30 years. It’s carefully constructed to get you to the information you need a quickly as possible, in just one or two clicks. The author is a master explainer, having published articles on quantum physics, turbulence, fusion energy, and many other topics (including gnuplot).

Why gnuplot?

Gnuplot is language-independent, and can be used with any computer language through its socket interface. It’s both easy to use (just type “plot sin(x)” at the terminal) and utterly customizable. It’s a standalone C program that is super fast and doesn’t crash on huge data. It can create any kind of file or plot to any kind of weird output device. It makes technical authorship easy, as it’s designed to work with LaTeX. It’s free, open source, and runs on anything. There’s simply nothing like it.

We believe that when you buy a book, it belongs to you. That’s why we use no “digital rights management” or anything else that interferes with your rights. You can make as many personal backups as you want, and use the book on any number of your own devices. If you lose your files, you can just download them again, forever.

Book+

Your purchase gets you more than a book. You will have free access to all updates and revisions, have the right to download the files as many times as you need to (we all lose things sometimes), and free access to any supplementary material available now or in the future. Your one-time purchase gets you this access forever.

gnuplot+

The book’s main mission is to be the best reference and tutorial about gnuplot you can get. But you will learn much else along the way: how best to visualize data in 2D & 3D, how to make beautiful documents, and how to leverage the other software on your system to process data, how to integrate graphics into LaTeX, how to animate your data, and more.

Doesn’t suck

This book is polished and complete, with a fully hyperlinked traditional index, table of contents, links to outside sources, buttons to save each script as a file for immediate use in gnuplot, and more, all designed to make it easy for you to find exactly what you want and use it immediately, while thoroughly explaining how everything works.

More details about the book.