One important, big-picture concept for matplotlib
is its object hierarchy. If you’ve ever worked through an introductory matplotlib
tutorial, you may have started with a little bit of code that looks like this:
plt.plot([1,2,3,4],[1,4,9,16])
This code plots a straight line. The problem is that this small amount of code hides the fact that a plot like this is really made up of a bunch of individual objects, and those objects contain their own objects. It’s a hierarchy of objects that all come together to make the beautiful graphics you’ll see in this course.