• Offer an introduction to Numpy & matplotlib
• Get you familiarised with the numpy API
• Understand basic plotting with matplotlib

Gnuplot is a free, command-driven, interactive, function and data plotting program. It can be downloaded at https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuplot/. The official Gnuplot documentation can be found at http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/documentation.html.

It was originally created to allow scientists and students to visualize mathematical functions and data interactively, but has grown to support many non-interactive uses such as web scripting. It is also used as a plotting engine by third-party applications such as Octave.

The command language of Gnuplot is case sensitive, i.e. commands and function names written in lowercase are not the same as those written in capitals. All command names may be abbreviated as long as the abbreviation is not ambiguous. Any number of commands may appear on a line, separated by semicolons (;). Strings may be set off by either single or double quotes, although there are some subtle differences. See syntax (p. 44) and quotes (p. 44) for more details in the Gnuplot documentation (http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/docs_5.0/gnuplot.pdf).

Commands may extend over several input lines by ending each line but the last with a backslash (\). The backslash must be the last character on each line. The effect is as if the backslash and newline were not there. That is, no white space is implied, nor is a comment terminated.

For built-in help on any topic, type help followed by the name of the topic or help ? to get a menu of available topics.