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)

Formatting the data for the arc

The reason that our arc() function won't work is the data isn't formatted properly for the function. The arc function that we generated expects the data object to have things like a start angle, an end angle, and so on. Fortunately, D3 can reformat our data so that it will work with our generated arc() function. To do this, we'll generate a pie function that will take a dataset and add the necessary attributes to it for the start angle, end angle, and so on. Add the following just before the code for var path =d3.select('g').selectAll('path')...:

var pie = d3.pie()
    .value(function(d) { return d.count; }) //use the 'count' property each value in the original array to determine how big the piece of pie should be
    .sort(null); //don't sort the values

Our pie variable is a function that takes...