Book Image

Learn Chart.js

By : Helder da Rocha
Book Image

Learn Chart.js

By: Helder da Rocha

Overview of this book

Chart.js is a free, open-source data visualization library, maintained by an active community of developers in GitHub, where it rates as the second most popular data visualization library. If you want to quickly create responsive Web-based data visualizations for the Web, Chart.js is a great choice. This book guides the reader through dozens of practical examples, complete with code you can run and modify as you wish. It is a practical hands-on introduction to Chart.js. If you have basic knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript you can learn to create beautiful interactive Web Canvas-based visualizations for your data using Chart.js. This book will help you set up Chart.js in a Web page and show how to create each one of the eight Chart.js chart types. You will also learn how to configure most properties that override Chart’s default styles and behaviors. Practical applications of Chart.js are exemplified using real data files obtained from public data portals. You will learn how to load, parse, filter and select the data you wish to display from those files. You will also learn how to create visualizations that reveal patterns in the data. This book is based on Chart.js version 2.7.3 and ES2015 JavaScript. By the end of the book, you will be able to create beautiful, efficient and interactive data visualizations for the Web using Chart.js.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 2. Technology Fundamentals

This book assumes that you have a working knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which are essential tools for creating visualizations with Chart.js. All examples in the book are written with JavaScript ES2015 or ES6. One of the goals of this chapter is to review the fundamental topics of these technologies. This includes JavaScript topics related to string, object, and array manipulation, the HTML document object model (DOM), basic JQuery, CSS selectors, and HTML canvas. You can, of course, skip these sections if you already feel comfortable with these technologies.

This chapter also describes popular data formats used in visualizations, such as CSV, XML, and JSON, and how to load, parse, and use external data files in these formats in your Web pages. You will also learn how to set up a small testing Web server to run files that load external resources.

The final section contains some tips on how to obtain and prepare data for your visualizations, how to...