Chapter 1, Getting Started, will briefly give an introduction on how to create a jqPlot object and how the plugin handles data. Then, we'll start creating our first charts, as well as looking at different options for formatting lines and marks.

Chapter 2, More Line Charts, Area Charts, and Scatter Plots, discusses the different ways in which you can load data into your chart, including using AJAX to a remote service. Then, we'll move on to discussing what area charts and scatter plots are, and their best uses.

Chapter 3, Bar Charts and Digging into Data, discusses the best uses of bar charts. We'll also see different options for axis and tick labels including rotatable labels. We'll finish up with clickable data points and will look at how to use these to drill down into more complicated data.

Chapter 4, Horizontal and Stacked Bar Charts, teaches you about horizontal and stacked bar charts. We'll also look at axis padding and positioning of data point labels.

Chapter 5, Pie Charts and Donut Charts, discusses the specific uses of pie charts and donut charts. We'll also see some specific options for pie charts.

Chapter 6, Spice Up Your Charts with Animation, Tooltips, and Highlighting, teaches how to animate your own charts and how to create tooltips. We'll also cover data point highlighting and cursor highlighting.

Chapter 7, Stock Market Charts – OHLC and Candlestick Charts, discusses OHLC and candlestick charts, and their specific uses. We'll also learn the method to format the text included in the tooltips.

Chapter 8, Bubble Charts, Block Plots, and Waterfalls, looks at some different charts that are heavier on the visualization of data over the representation of the data.

Chapter 9, Showing Real-time Data with Our Charts, discusses the methods that allow us to redraw or recreate a given plot after it is has been generated. We'll take this newfound knowledge and see how to update our charts automatically at set intervals.

Chapter 10, Beautifying and Extending Your Charts, explains how to create different themes for our plots and the various CSS options available to style our charts.

Chapter 11, Bringing it All Together, combines everything you have learned and merges the different chart types into one plot, as well as styling your new charts. You will also see how jqPlot can be extended with the new rendering plugins.

Appendix, Answers, helps us find the answers to all the learning questions found throughout the book.

You use jQuery for most of your projects, so you're well on your way to learning jqPlot. Here's what else you'll need to get up and running with jqPlot:

That's it! You don't need anything else. Ideally, you would incorporate your charts into a larger project such as your company intranet. This would also be the best place to get the data for your charts.

This book is for everyone who uses jQuery for their projects. More specifically, this book is for everyone who has ever experienced something like the following scenario: "We've got 3 years of data that we need to analyze and chart by Friday. Work your magic."

I'm writing this book to help you solve problems. You're a developer, so you are smart and curious. If you're like me, you like seeing how data is interconnected. So, I want to help you determine the best way to present the data that your boss dumped on you.

As you begin working, I want to help you begin thinking of other data points you could bring into your reports. As you begin thinking of new connections, this will help those who will be looking at the data when you're done. In the end, I want to make you a hero to your boss.

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, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "For the yaxis option, we set our label and use the formatString option to format our values as currency."

A block of code is set as follows:

   <script>
   $(document).ready(function(){
     var secondPlot = $.jqplot ('secondChart', [[[5,4],[10,7],[15,6],[20,9]]]);
   });
   </script>
   <div id="secondChart" style="width:400px;"></div>

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

<script src="../js/jqplot.dateAxisRenderer.min.js"></script>
<script>
$(document).ready(function(){

  var revenue = [['2012-07-20', 807403], ['2012-08-20', 755840], ['2012-09-20', 775304]];
  var profit = [['2012-07-20', 193793.82], ['2012-08-20', 183221.56], ['2012-09-20', 192797.31]];
  var electronics = [['2012-07-20', 116276.29], ['2012-08-20', 95867.97], ['2012-09-20', 120591.27]];
  var media = [['2012-07-20', 27596.25], ['2012-08-20', 32396.47], ['2012-09-20', 26709.06]];
  var nerd_corral = [['2012-07-20', 49921.28], ['2012-08-20', 54957.12], ['2012-09-20', 45496.98]];

  var rev_profit = $.jqplot ('division_profit', [revenue, profit, electronics, media, nerd_corral],
  {

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: "We test our chart, and a trend line for DVDs/Blu-ray is rendered since we did not pass a query string."

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To send us general feedback, simply send an e-mail to <[email protected]>, and mention the book title through the subject of your message.

If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide on www.packtpub.com/authors.

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