Manual for Package pgfplots
2D/3D Plots in LATeX, Version 1.18.1
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgfplots
Chapter 2 About PGFPlots: Preliminaries
Sections
This section contains information about upgrades, the team, the installation (in case you need to do it manually) and troubleshooting. You may skip it completely except for the upgrade remarks.
pgfplots is built completely on TikZ/pgf. Knowledge of TikZ will simplify the work with pgfplots, although it is not required.