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

Essential JavaScript for Chart.js


Client-side applications, such as interactive Web graphics, depend on browser support. This book assumes that your audience uses browsers that support HTML5 Canvas and ES2015 (which include all modern browsers). All examples use ES2015 syntax, including const and let instead of var, arrow functions where appropriate, spread operators, maps, sets, and promises. External files are loaded using the Fetch API, which has only been supported more recently, but you can easily switch to JQuery if necessary.

Although the creation of visualizations with Chart.js is mostly a declarative process, it is still a JavaScript library and requires basic knowledge of JavaScript. To create a simple chart, you need to know how to declare constants and variables, perform basic mathematical Boolean string and attribution operations, call and create functions, manipulate objects and arrays, and instantiate the Chart.js object. A typical chart also requires enough knowledge to program...