Rocket Surgery

If you have ever needed to produce a diagram of shapes connected by lines — and what software developer hasn’t? — you’ve probably thought to yourself “there’s got to be a better way to do this” as you open up your graphics editor and start dragging around rectangles and lines.

One tool you owe it to yourself to learning about is Graphviz (www.graphviz.org). With this tool, you prepare an input text file listing the nodes, and the connections between them, and it produces diagrams for you.
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