In these notebooks, I've worked out a bunch of details of python map-making that are probably not so tricky to spatial analysis gurus, but they took me a while to get them all figured out. Eventually I would love to turn this into more of a guide.
http://jose-coto.com/plotting-geopandas http://darribas.org/gds15/content/labs/lab_03.html http://michelleful.github.io/code-blog/2015/04/29/geopandas-manipulation/ http://geopandas.org/ http://magic.lib.uconn.edu/connecticut_data.html