Graphics Tools in C Programming Language

Dealing with Data

This section contains a brief introduction to some of the graphics tools available on the Drexel Physics computer lab.

Programs--scientific ones, at least--tend to generate lots of data. You have already seen examples of this in the C-language primer document, and you will see many more. Once, you had little choice as to what you could do with those data. You could only print it out and look at it in the form of columns of figures on the screen. Pretty dull...!

Often, the best way to represent a large dataset is in graphical form. At its simplest, this may just mean drawing simple line graphs. In more sophisticated contexts, you may end up making an elaborate 3-D movie, complete with audio track, to illustrate the Physics and explain your findings to others. Such sophisticated visualization is more an art than a science, and usually calls for specialized hardware and software (although you can actually get quite far without leaving our lab).

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