D3.js is a JavaScript library designed to display digital data in a dynamic graphical form. It helps you to bring data to life using HTML, SVG, and CSS. D3 allows great control over the final visual result, and it is the hottest and most powerful web-based data visualization technology on the market today.
This book is packed with practical recipes to help you learn every aspect of data visualization with D3. It is designed to provide you with all the guidance you need to get to grips with data visualization with D3. With this book, you will create breathtaking data visualization with professional efficiency and precision with the help of practical recipes, illustrations, and code samples.
This cookbook starts off by touching upon data visualization and D3 basics before gradually taking you through a number of practical recipes covering a wide range of topics you need to know about D3.
You will learn the fundamental concepts of data visualization, functional JavaScript, and D3 fundamentals including element selection, data binding, animation, and SVG generation. You will also learn how to leverage more advanced techniques such as custom interpolators, custom tweening, timers, the layout manager, force manipulation, and so on. This book also provides a number of prebuilt chart recipes with ready-to-go sample code to help you bootstrap quickly.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with D3.js, is designed to get you up and running with D3.js. It covers the fundamental aspects such as what D3.js is and how to set up a typical D3.js data visualization environment.
Chapter 2, Be Selective, teaches you one of the most fundamental tasks you need to perform with any data visualization project using D3—selection. Selection helps you target certain visual elements on the page.
Chapter 3, Dealing with Data, explores the most essential question in any data visualization project—how data can be represented both in programming constructs, and its visual metaphor.
Chapter 4, Tipping the Scales, deals with a very important subdomain of data visualization. As a data visualization developer, one key task that you need to perform over and over again is to map values in your data domain to visual domain, which is the focus of this chapter.
Chapter 5, Playing with Axes, explores the usage of axes' component and some related techniques commonly used in Cartesian coordinate system based visualization.
Chapter 6, Transition with Style, deals with transitions. "A picture is worth a thousand words," this age-old wisdom is arguably one of the most important cornerstones of data visualization. This chapter covers transition and animation support provided by D3 library.
Chapter 7, Getting into Shape, deals with Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), which is a mature World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard widely used in visualization projects.
Chapter 8, Chart Them Up, explores one of the oldest and well trusted companions in data visualization—charts. Charts are well defined and well understood graphical representations of data.
Chapter 9, Lay Them Out, focuses on D3 Layout. D3 layouts are algorithms that calculate and generate placement information for a group of elements capable of generating some of the most complex and interesting visualization.
Chapter 10, Interacting with your Visualization, focuses on D3 human visualization interaction support, or in other words how to add computational steering capability to your visualization.
Chapter 11, Using Force, covers one of the most fascinating aspects of D3—Force. Force simulation is one of the most awe-inspiring techniques that you can add to your visualization.
Chapter 12, Know your Map, introduces basic D3 cartographic visualization techniques and how to implement a fully functional geographic visualization in D3.
Chapter 13, Test Drive your Visualization, teaches you to implement your visualization like a pro with Test Driven Development (TDD).
Appendix A, Building Interactive Analytics in Minutes serves as an introduction to Crossfilter.js and dc.js on interactive dimensional charting.
A text editor: To edit and create HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files
A web browser: A modern web browser (Firefox 3, IE 9, Chrome, Safari 3.2 and above)
A local HTTP server: You need a local HTTP server to host data file for some of the more advanced recipes in this book. We will cover how to set up a Node or Python based simple HTTP server in the first chapter.
Git client (Optional): If you would like to check out the recipe source code directly from our Git repository, you need a Git client installed on your computer.
If you are a developer or an analyst familiar with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and you wish to get the most out of D3, then this book is for you. This book can also serve as a desktop quick-reference guide for experienced data visualization developers.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can select HTML elements through the use of the d3.select function."
A block of code is set as follows:
instance.description = function (d) {
if (!arguments.length) d;
description = d;
return instance;
};When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
instance.description = function (d) {
if (!arguments.length) d;
description = d;
return instance;
};Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
> npm install http-server –g
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".
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