Book Image

ActionScript Graphing Cookbook

Book Image

ActionScript Graphing Cookbook

Overview of this book

"A picture is worth a thousand words" has never been more true than when representing large sets of data. Bar charts, heat maps, cartograms, and many more have become important tools in applications and presentations to quickly give insight into complicated issues.The "ActionScript Graphing Cookbook" shows you how to add your own charts to any ActionScript program. The recipes give step-by-step instructions on how to process the input data, how to create various types of charts and how to make them interactive for even more user engagement.Starting with basic ActionScript knowledge, you will learn how to develop many different types of charts.First learn how to import your data, from Excel, web services and more. Next process the data and make it ready for graphical display. Pick one of the many graph options available as the book guides you through ActionScript's drawing functions. And when you're ready for it, branch out into 3D display.The recipes in the "ActionScript Graphing Cookbook" will gradually introduce you into the world of visualization.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
ActionScript Graphing Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Drawing bubble charts


Bubble charts are an evolution of the point chart. By being able to modify the size of the point (bubble in this case) we can visualize one more dimension for our data. Actually, by adding colors to the bubble and a legend (a legend contains a list of the variables appearing in the chart and an example of their appearance) you could even visualize four dimensions. An example of using the bubble chart would be to plot the impact of education on the salary over the years between United States, China, and Russia. The x axis would represent the years, the y axis would be the salaries, the size of the bubbles would be degree of education (bigger being having more education), and the colors would represent the countries. This is depicted in the following figure:

Getting ready

Take a look at the files in the Bubble Chart folder in the code files downloadable from www.packtpub.com. This chart will also use horizontal and vertical axes so it might be good to read Chapter 1, Getting...