Book Image

D3.js Quick Start Guide

By : Matthew Huntington
Book Image

D3.js Quick Start Guide

By: Matthew Huntington

Overview of this book

D3.js is a JavaScript library that allows you to create graphs and data visualizations in the browser with HTML, SVG, and CSS. This book will take you from the basics of D3.js, so that you can create your own interactive visualizations, to creating the most common graphs that you will encounter as a developer, scientist, statistician, or data scientist. The book begins with an overview of SVG, the basis for creating two-dimensional graphics in the browser. Once the reader has a firm understanding of SVG, we will tackle the basics of how to use D3.js to connect data to our SVG elements. We will start with a scatter plot that maps run data to circles on a graph, and expand our scatter plot to make it interactive. You will see how you can easily allow the users of your graph to create, edit, and delete run data by simply dragging and clicking the graph. Next, we will explore creating a bar graph, using external data from a mock API. After that, we will explore animations and motion with a bar graph, and use various physics-based forces to create a force-directed graph. Finally, we will look at how to use GeoJSON data to create a map.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Adjusting the height and the width of the bars

Let's create a scale that maps the count property of each element in data to a visual height for the corresponding bar. We'll use a linear scale. Remember to map HEIGHT of the graph to a very low data point and the top of the graph (0 in the range) map to a very high data value. Add this code to the bottom of the AJAX callback:

var yScale = d3.scaleLinear();
yScale.range([HEIGHT, 0]);
var yMin = d3.min(data, function(datum, index){
    return datum.count;
})
var yMax = d3.max(data, function(datum, index){
    return datum.count;
})
yScale.domain([yMin, yMax]);

We could use d3.extent, but we're going to need the individual min values later on. Immediately after the previous code, let's tell D3 to adjust the height of the rectangles using the yScale. Remember that the y axis is flipped. A low data value produces...