I smiled when I learned that there would be a book about gnuplot. It had been a long time since Colin and I were busy compiling new builds, which at the time needed to be cut up into little “packages” to fit on the relatively new USENET. And a long time since we heard from the early customers. To be honest, back then, we were pretty surprised at the actual volume of reactions and the diversity of uses people were finding for it. It made us really happy to realize that universities, researchers, economists, hospitals, and various companies around the world were using it. For me, it was a bellwether for the future power of the Internet and open source software. I still remember when the “University of Free Estonia” sent us an email just days before the Baltic States had officially announced their independence. And I remember tracking when we’d been deployed in every inhabited continent (with active websites in Czech, French, German, Indonesian, Japanese, Portuguese, Slovak, Italian, and more). And now this new book, Gnuplot in Action, is finally available to help those people starting out with gnuplot or those stepping up to do more complicated things!

There are a few fundamental beliefs I’d like readers to understand about gnuplot. From the beginning, it had to be fun, with no learning curve to create your first few plots. It had to be free and stay free. It had to be easily available and reliable. We wrote it to run on every type of computer, every display, every printer we could get our hands on. But of course we didn’t have everything on hand and new devices launched all the time. So there was a requirement for gnuplot to be modifiable, so that one group of users or developers could write new features simply and have the results included in subsequent versions. Ultimately, gnuplot of today owes most of its success to the many volunteers who consistently contribute ideas and time to the development of the project. The result, hopefully, is a product powerful enough to create graphs which convey exactly the information their authors intended.

Enjoy!

Thomas “thaw” Williams
Google
Original Gnuplot Author