I am making a series of bar plots of data with two categorical variables and one numeric. What i have is the below, but what I would love to do is to facet by one of the categor
Second example here: http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/visualization.html#bar-plots
Anyway, you can always do that by hand, as you did yourself.
EDIT: BTW, you can always use rpy2 in python, so you can do all the same things as in R.
Also, have a look at this: http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/rplot.html I am not sure, but it should be helpful for creating plots over many panels, though might require further reading.