The otherday it was about time I tried out [gnuplot] for a change. I used to do all of my scientific ploting (and actually a lot of my analysis) in [R]. These days I tend to use [python+matplotlib]... but I wanted something that would allow me quickly to visualise data and plot functions without much effort... this is where [gnuplot] really does seem to be powerful.
I came across an excellent intro to gnuplot page: [Plotting Data with gnuplot].
Here is an example plot of what you can easily produce in a few seconds. Pretty swish.
Oh and gnuplot is nicely in the [Ubuntu] repositories... you probably want to get:
sudo apt-get install gnuplot-x11
