ActionScript Graphing Cookbook

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.

ActionScript Graphing Cookbook

Credits

About the Authors

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

Getting Started with Graph Drawing

Introduction

Drawing in two dimensions

Building point charts

Creating a line graph based on a function

Adding labels and axes

Graphing a spreadsheet

Using Flex for charts

Working with Data

Introduction

Preparing your data

Embedding CSV files

Loading a data file from the Internet

Loading a file from the local hard drive

Loading data with XML

Loading data from Excel files

Consuming the REST services

Exporting data as CSV to import in Excel

Exporting data to a PDF file

Creating Bar Charts

Introduction

Drawing a bar chart with Flex

Building vertical bar charts

Creating comparison bar charts

Drawing histograms

Creating sparklines to enrich text content

Making 3D bar charts

Drawing Different Types of Graphs

Introduction

Drawing a pie chart with Flex

Creating donut charts

Drawing meters and gauges

Making Venn diagrams

Building pyramid charts

Drawing bubble charts

Creating tag clouds

Creating a treemap

Adding Interaction

Introduction

Zooming and panning around a graph

Sending data updates to the graph

Making the points interactive: Hovering

Selecting data points in the graph

A dynamic graph based on an editable table

Dragging data points to new values

Linking graphs

Mapping Geographical and Spatial Data

Introduction

Showing a map using the openscales.org API

Adding points of interest to a map

Parsing data to use as region fill

Coloring a map

Adding multiple layers to a map

Overlaying a heat map

Animating a Graph

Introduction

Animating between two data sets

Animating a meter

Automatic updates

Zooming in on a specific data set

Animating subway locations

Creating a Relational Network

Introduction

Preparing the data

Creating the visual for a node

Arranging and linking the nodes

Navigating through the relational network

Animating the transitions

Adding sounds

Creating Three-Dimensional Graphs

Introduction

Drawing in 3D: a 3D starter project

Creating a 3D column chart

Moving around the chart

Beyond the cube, drawing different shapes

Graphing tabular data in 3D

Styling the graph with different materials

Graphing a function in three dimensions

Working with Various 3D Graph Types

Introduction

Mapping keyboard usage in 3D, part 1: The model

Mapping keyboard usage in 3D, part 2: The data

3D world population chart, part 1: The globe

3D world population chart, part 2: Dressing up

3D world population chart, part 3: The data

Index

Customer Reviews

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Introduction

If this is your very first time programming 3D, this chapter is going to be a challenge. There's no way around it, but programming 3D involves a lot more than drawing in two dimensions.

Not only do you have an additional coordinate, but you also need to convert the 3D drawing into a 2D image that can be shown on the screen.

There are models, cameras, scenes, views, and much more that you usually don't need to understand for 2D programming. But even the smallest 3D program requires you to at least understand the basic concepts and know how they fit in the larger picture.

Luckily, there are many tutorials online to get started with 3D and ActionScript. For instance, the following link provides a good overview of the basics: http://www.flashmagazine.com/Tutorials/detail/flash_3d_basics/

In this chapter and the next, we will focus solely on Away3D (http://away3d.com/). This is one of the most popular and open source 3D libraries for ActionScript. We use only this library to keep the...

ActionScript Graphing Cookbook

ActionScript Graphing Cookbook

Overview of this book

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ActionScript Graphing Cookbook

Introduction