Book Image

Learn D3.js

By : Helder da Rocha
2 (1)
Book Image

Learn D3.js

2 (1)
By: Helder da Rocha

Overview of this book

This book is a practical hands-on introduction to D3 (Data-driven Documents): the most popular open-source JavaScript library for creating interactive web-based data visualizations. Based entirely on open web standards, D3 provides an integrated collection of tools for efficiently binding data to graphical elements. If you have basic knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript you can use D3.js to create beautiful interactive web-based data visualizations. D3 is not a charting library. It doesn’t contain any pre-defined chart types, but can be used to create whatever visual representations of data you can imagine. The goal of this book is to introduce D3 and provide a learning path so that you obtain a solid understanding of its fundamental concepts, learn to use most of its modules and functions, and gain enough experience to create your own D3 visualizations. You will learn how to create bar, line, pie and scatter charts, trees, dendograms, treemaps, circle packs, chord/ribbon diagrams, sankey diagrams, animated network diagrams, and maps using different geographical projections. Fundamental concepts are explained in each chapter and then applied to a larger example in step-by-step tutorials, complete with full code, from hundreds of examples you can download and run. This book covers D3 version 5 and is based on ES2015 JavaScript.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Introduction

This chapter will introduce the D3.js (data-driven document) JavaScript library, describing its main features, explaining how it works, and showing how it drives data to transform documents. D3 contains an integrated set of tools that will help you bind data to graphical elements in a web page, in order to create scatterplots, bar charts, line charts, hierarchical node-link diagrams, networks, chord diagrams, sunburst charts, thematic geographic maps, or any interactive data visualization you can imagine. But D3.js is also a huge library, and is famous for having a steep learning curve. The goal of this book is to provide a learning path that will help you grasp its fundamental data-driven concepts and become familiar with its essential API.

In this chapter, you will learn how to set up your environment and test it by creating a very simple D3 application. It also includes a general overview of D3’s architecture, describing the relationships between its many modules and a brief description of each one.

This chapter will outline the following topics:

  • D3 data-driven documents
  • Using D3
  • Modules microlibraries