Plotting in Python
what format is your data in?
Python offers modules to read data from a variety of data formats (CSV, JSON, XML, ...)
CSV is a very common one that suffices for many cases (the csv module is part of the standard library)
Typically you write a small routine that casts the different fields as expected (string to floating point numbers, or dates, integers,...) and cast your data in a numpy matrix (np.array) where each row corresponds to a sample and each column to an observation
for the plots check matplotlib. It is really easy to generate graphs, especially if you have some previous experience with Matlab
I'm new to python and was curious as to how, given a large set of data consisting of census information, I could plot a histogram or graph of some sort.  My main question is how to access the file, not exactly how the graph should be coded.  Do I import the file directly? How do I extract the data from the file? How is this done?
Thanks