[rahimnathwani]

Anyone who plans to spend more than an hour using matplotlib should study this page: https://matplotlib.org/stable/tutorials/introductory/lifecyc...

I wanted to draw something I thought would be simple using matplotlib or seaborn. The components were themselves pretty standard:

1. A combo chart (two y variables: one as a line, one as vertical bars).

2. A facet grid (multiple charts with the same axis definition, with each chart representing a slice of the data).

#1 is easy in Excel

#2 is easy in Matplotlib

So I thought the combination of the two would be easy in Matplotlib. At first, it wasn't easy.

It turns out that, if you try and learn matplotlib by googling examples as and when you need them, you may not build a good mental model of how matplotlib charts work. So you hit a wall when you try to do something for which there's no good example online.

But if you read the documentation (particularly the page linked above), things get much easier and the frustration melts away.