Data-driven documents

The goal of this chapter is to introduce the d3.js JavaScript library, outline its main features, explain how it works, and show how it drives data to create interactive visualizations. Additionally, this chapter provides instructions for setting up a basic environment where you can practice with D3 and explore the examples and exercises in this book, either by configuring a local workspace on your computer or using an online JavaScript platform. To verify your setup, you will create a simple D3 application.

At the end of this chapter, you will also find a brief overview of the library’s modular architecture. D3 is a huge library containing an integrated set of tools that will help you bind data to graphical elements in a web page and create interactive and animated scatterplots, bar charts, hierarchical node-link diagrams, networks, chord diagrams, sunburst charts, thematic geographic maps, or any interactive data visualization you can imagine. These tools are organized into versioned modules with detailed GitHub documentation. We will cover most of these modules in the book.

In this chapter we will cover the following topics:

• What is D3?
• Using D3
• Setting up a development environment for D3
• Hello, world!
• Exploring D3’s modules

When you finish this chapter, you will have set up an environment where you can start coding with D3 and use it to create a simple application. You will also have a general understanding of the library and its modules.