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

Mapping and setting colors with scatter plots

Colors are extremely important in conveying and expressing information about our charts. It is also a very big topic, and a full discussion is beyond the scope of this book. We will focus on colors for two types of variables – discrete and continuous. We will also tackle two ways of using colors in our charts: mapping variables to colors, and manually setting our colors.

We start by exploring the differences between the two types of variables.

Discrete and continuous variables

Simply speaking, continuous variables are the ones that can take an infinite number of possible values in a certain range of numbers. For example, population is a number that can take any value, based on the number of people living in a certain country. Continuous variables are typically numbers (integers or real numbers). Height, weight, and speed are other examples as well.

Discrete variables, on the other hand, are variables that can take the...