Foreword

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!