📊 Day 3: Horizontal Bar Chart in Python

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🔍 What is a Horizontal Bar Chart?

A horizontal bar chart displays bars from left to right instead of bottom to top.

It is especially useful when:

• Category names are long

• There are many categories

• You want to show rankings clearly

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✅ When Should You Use a Horizontal Bar Chart?

Use it when:

• Labels don’t fit well on the x-axis

• You want easy comparison across categories

• Displaying Top-N lists

Real-world examples:

• Most popular programming languages

• Top-selling products

• Employee performance ranking

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📊 Example Dataset

Let’s compare popularity of programming languages:

Language	Popularity
Python	95
Java	80
JavaScript	85
C++	70

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🧠 Python Code: Horizontal Bar Chart Using Matplotlib

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# Data
languages = ['Python', 'Java', 'JavaScript', 'C++']
popularity = [95, 80, 85, 70]

# Create horizontal bar chart
plt.barh(languages, popularity)

# Labels and title
plt.xlabel('Popularity Score')
plt.ylabel('Programming Languages')
plt.title('Programming Language Popularity') 

# Display chart
plt.show()

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🧩 Code Explanation (Simple)

• plt.barh() → creates a horizontal bar chart

• Categories appear on the y-axis

• Values appear on the x-axis

• Bars grow left to right

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📊 Horizontal Bar vs Vertical Bar Chart

Chart Type	Function
Vertical Bar (Column Chart)	plt.bar()
Horizontal Bar Chart	plt.barh()

🔑 Key Takeaways

✔ Best for long category labels
✔ Improves readability
✔ Ideal for ranking data