Book Image

Interactive Dashboards and Data Apps with Plotly and Dash

By : Elias Dabbas
Book Image

Interactive Dashboards and Data Apps with Plotly and Dash

By: Elias Dabbas

Overview of this book

Plotly's Dash framework is a life-saver for Python developers who want to develop complete data apps and interactive dashboards without JavaScript, but you'll need to have the right guide to make sure you’re getting the most of it. With the help of this book, you'll be able to explore the functionalities of Dash for visualizing data in different ways. Interactive Dashboards and Data Apps with Plotly and Dash will first give you an overview of the Dash ecosystem, its main packages, and the third-party packages crucial for structuring and building different parts of your apps. You'll learn how to create a basic Dash app and add different features to it. Next, you’ll integrate controls such as dropdowns, checkboxes, sliders, date pickers, and more in the app and then link them to charts and other outputs. Depending on the data you are visualizing, you'll also add several types of charts, including scatter plots, line plots, bar charts, histograms, and maps, as well as explore the options available for customizing them. By the end of this book, you'll have developed the skills you need to create and deploy an interactive dashboard, handle complexities and code refactoring, and understand the process of improving your application.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Building a Dash App
6
Section 2: Adding Functionality to Your App with Real Data
11
Section 3: Taking Your App to the Next Level

Chapter 1: Overview of the Dash Ecosystem

One of the few constants in our work with data is the amount of change in the volume, sources, and types of data that we deal with. Being able to quickly combine data from different sources and explore them is crucial. Dash is not only for exploring data; it can be used for almost all phases of the data analysis process, from exploration to operational production environments.

In this chapter, we will get an overview of Dash's ecosystem and focus on building the layout, or the user-facing part, of the app. By the end of the chapter, you will be able to build a running app with almost any visual component you want, but without interactivity.

The following topics will be covered:

  • Setting up your environment
  • Exploring Dash and other supporting packages
  • Understanding the general structure of a Dash app
  • Creating and running the simplest app
  • Adding HTML and other components to the app
  • Learning how to structure the layout and managing themes