getting started with flot in rails4

I'd like some pointers getting a flot "hello world" equivalent running in my rails4 app. I've found lots of examples of creating lovely graphs, but I'm stuck at the basics, like,

Once I've downloaded and unzipped flot-0.8.2.zip file, where do I put all those .js files?
Do I need all those .js files?
What do I add to app/assets/javascripts/application.js file?
...etc.

I'd prefer NOT to use a gem -- at least not yet -- because I want to learn what's going on under the hood.

Solution

Answering my own question after looking at some Heroku examples:

setup:

go to http://www.flotcharts.org/
download http://www.flotcharts.org/downloads/flot-0.8.2.zip (or whatever's newest) to the directory of your choice
unzip it
copy jquery.flot.js to the /app/assets/javascripts directory

edit /app/assets/javascripts/application.js to include the jquery.flot.js, as in:

//= require jquery
//= require jquery_ujs
//= require jquery.flot.js
//= require turbolinks
//= require_tree .

make a graph:

In any view file, (e.g. /app/views/myclass/index.html.erb), add the following:

<!-- create a placeholder for the flot graph -->
<div id="flot-placeholder" style="width:300px; height: 200px"></div>

<script type="text/javascript">
$(function() {
    var d1 = [];
    for (var i = 0; i < 14; i += 0.5) {
        d1.push([i, Math.sin(i)]);
    }
    var d2 = [[0, 3], [4, 8], [8, 5], [9, 13]];
    // A null signifies separate line segments
    var d3 = [[0, 12], [7, 12], null, [7, 2.5], [12, 2.5]];
    $.plot("#flot-placeholder", [ d1, d2, d3 ]);
});
</script>

test it:

Render the page. You should see something similar to http://www.flotcharts.org/flot/examples/basic-usage/index.html