title: Easiest way to plot data on country map with python
body: <p>Could not delete question. Please refer to question: <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36118998/shade-states-of-a-country-according-to-dictionary-values-with-basemap">Shade states of a country according to dictionary values with Basemap</a> </p>
  
  <p>I want to plot data (number of sick people for a certain year) on each state of Mexico. 
  I am using jupyter notebook.
  So far I have seen several options and tutorials, but none seem to seem to explicitly explain how to plot the map of a country. Below I explain some options/tutorial I have seen and why they have not worked (this I do just to argue that tutorials are not very straight forward):</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>Bokeh (<a href="http://docs.bokeh.org/en/latest/docs/gallery/texas.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://docs.bokeh.org/en/latest/docs/gallery/texas.html</a>). In the tutorial texas state is plotted given that us_counties is in bokeh.sampledata. However I have not found other countries in the sampledata. </p></li>
  <li><p>mpl_toolkits.basemap (<a href="http://www.geophysique.be/2011/01/27/matplotlib-basemap-tutorial-07-shapefiles-unleached/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.geophysique.be/2011/01/27/matplotlib-basemap-tutorial-07-shapefiles-unleached/</a>). Although I am able to import shapefile, I cannot run <code>from shapefile import ShapeFile</code> (ImportError: cannot import name ShapeFile). Furthermore I have not been able to download dbflib library.</p></li>
  <li><p>Vincent (<a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32649494/why-python-vincent-map-visuzalization-does-not-map-data-from-data-frame">Why Python Vincent map visuzalization does not map data from Data Frame?</a>) When I run the code from the answer in said tutorial no image appears (even though I used command <code>vincent.core.initialize_notebook()</code> ).</p></li>
  <li><p>Plotly (<a href="https://plot.ly/python/choropleth-maps/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://plot.ly/python/choropleth-maps/</a>). The tutorial plots the map of USA importing information from a csv table (no information of other countries available). If wanting to plot another country, would it be possible to make the table?</p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Explored this 4 options I have found tutorials not to be very clear or easy to follow. I find it hard to believe that plotting a map of a country is difficult in python. I think there must be an easier way than the ones explained in the past tutorials.</p>
  
  <p>The question is: 
  Which is the easiest (hopefully simple) way to plot the map of a certain country (any) with python and how?</p>
  
  <p>I have installed the following packages: matplotlib, pyshp, mpl_toolkits.basemap, bokeh, pandas, numpy. 
  I have also downloaded Mexico's map from <a href="http://www.gadm.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.gadm.org/</a> </p>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance.</p>