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)

Generating a path using a projection and GeoJSON data

Now that we have our projection, we're going to generate <path> elements for each data element in the map_json.features array. Then, we will set the fill of each element to #099. Add the following to the end of app.js:

d3.select('svg').selectAll('path')
    .data(map_json.features)
    .enter()
    .append('path')
    .attr('fill', '#099');

The following screenshot shows what it should look if we open index.html in Chrome and view the Elements tab in the Developer tools:

We created the path elements, but they each need a d attribute, which will determine how they will be drawn (that is, their shapes).

We want something like the following:

d3.selectAll('path').attr('d', function(datum, index){
    //use datum to generate the value for the &apos...