BOOK REVIEWS
J. Chem. Inf. Model., Vol. 48, No. 10, 2008 2095
BOOK REVIEWS
Book Review of Gnuplot in Action Gnuplot in Action. By Philipp K. Janert. Manning Publications Co.: Greenwich, CT, 2009. xxvi + 295pp + appendices. ISBN 1-933988-39-8. E-book, U.S. $22.50; softcover, U.S. $34.99. “Famous scientific plotting package”: This succinct yet accurate description of gnuplot appears on its SourceForge project page. Despite being one of the most well-known open source scientific projects around, it has taken 15 years for the first book on gnuplot to be published. Gnuplot in Action by Philipp K. Janert will be published by Manning Publications in Jan 2009 (the first chapter is available free at http://www.manning.com/janert/). The fact that the name of the program starts with a lowercase letter should indicate that gnuplot is unlike most modern graphing packages. All plotting operations are controlled by commands entered at an interactive prompt. While this is one of gnuplot’s most powerful features, as it allows the user to automatically generate graphs using scripts, it also means that there is a steep learning curve. Gnuplot does come with its own, quite comprehensive, documentation. However, that documentation is more of a reference guide, useful for looking up the options for a particular command. In contrast, this book takes the user through the different capabilities of gnuplot, from the absolute basics through to advanced usage, and is suitable both for complete newcomers to gnuplot as well as those with considerable experience. The first section of the book deals with importing data from a file, transforming the data, creating a simple plot, and saving the resulting image to disk. The second section deals with customizing the appearance of plots using plot styles and grids and manipulating the axes. The third section, “Advanced Gnuplot”, deals with 3D graphs, handling color palettes, multiplots, curve fitting, terminals, macros, using gnuplot for CGI, and interfacing to scripting languages. The approach taken by the author is to focus on only the most useful features, while referring the reader to the gnuplot documentation for
more obscure options. Everything is illustrated with examples and, as you might expect, a large number of graphs. Although the author has been using gnuplot for 15 years, he is still aware of what the most annoying features are and has some sympathy for the user, e.g. “Nevertheless, it is very different from the behavior we have come to expect from user interfaces in most programs” (in reference to how images are saved in gnuplot). Overall I found this book both useful and interesting. I particularly liked the sidebars and comments on particular techniques. For example, the chapter on 3D plots includes a short discussion of the pitfalls of using 3D plots and alternative plotting methods that might be more suitable. The chapter on color includes a similar warning as well as a discussion on palette design. The fourth and final section of the book is entitled “Graphical Analysis with Gnuplot” and covers techniques for analyzing particular types of data (e.g., star plots for multivariate data) as well as some general principles for comparing data visually. Sections like these turn the book into something more than a straightforward technical manual. Any negatives? Well, I was not very interested in the section on reading data from disk and transforming itsI think that anyone who knows Perl or Python is going to reshape or filter their data before getting it into gnuplotsbut admittedly the book claims to be suitable for nonprogrammers. Also, the author’s favorite interactive terminal, wxt, is not available for Windows, and so I was a bit disappointed when I started gnuplot but could not find it. However, these are minor issues. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to make the most of gnuplot, the “famous scientific plotting package”.
Noel M. O’Boyle Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre CI800306B 10.1021/ci800306b
