The Graphviz Cookbook

I've been working on a how-to book about Graphviz, a powerful, open-source, graph visualization and processing framework.

The Graphviz Cookbook, like a regular cookbook, is meant to be a practical guide that shows you how to create something tangible and, hopefully, teaches you how to improvise your own creations using similar techniques.

The book is organized into four parts:

• Part 1: Getting Started introduces the Graphviz tool suite and provides "quick start" instructions to help you get up-and-running wit Graphviz for the first time.

• Part 2: Ingredients describes the elements of the Graphviz ecosystem in more detail, including an in-depth review of each application in the Graphviz family.

• Part 3: Techniques reviews several idioms or "patterns" that crop up often when working with Graphviz such as how to tweak a graph's layout or add a "legend" to a graph. You might think of these as "micro-recipes" that are used again and again.

• Part 4: Recipes contains detailed walk-throughs of how to accomplish specific tasks with Graphviz, such as how to spider a website to generate a sitemap or how to generate UML diagrams from source files.

You can download the following sample chapters (for personal use) in a PDF format:

• Chapter 1: Graphviz in a nutshell is an excerpt from Part 1 ("Getting Started").

• Chapter 6: Section 7: patchwork is an excerpt from Part 2 ("Ingredients").

• Chapter 10: Using gvpr to style graphs is an excerpt from Part 3 ("Techniques").

• Chapter 26: A treemap of folder contents is an excerpt from Part 4 ("Recipes").