What you need for this book

At the absolute least, you will need the following Python packages installed on your system: NumPy, SciPy, Basemap, and (of course) Matplotlib. To work on the instructions presented in Chapter 5, Embedding Matplotlib, you will want to have at least one of the following GUI toolkits installed: GTK, Tkinter (should come with Python), wxWidgets, or Qt (version 4 is preferred; version 5 is supported only recently for Matplotlib version 1.4). You will also need the corresponding Python bindings for the GUI toolkits (some come with them by default).