Summary

This chapter provided a general introduction to the D3.js library, describing its architecture and modules, and showing how to set up a small D3 application that, although very simple, demonstrated one of the central paradigms in D3, which is driving the appearance of a visualization using arbitrary data.

You now have a working development environment and a foundation to build on. In the coming chapters, you'll dive deeper into the tools and techniques that make D3 one of the most powerful data visualization libraries available.

The next two chapters cover key web technologies – JavaScript and SVG – that you will need throughout the rest of this book.

Chapter 2 reviews the fundamental data structures in ES 2019 JavaScript. It also includes a short reference about the DOM, the Canvas API, and common data formats such as JSON and CSV.

Chapter 3 is a hands-on introduction to SVG, showing how to create shapes using SVG tags and attributes and using SVG DOM functions. SVG is the graphics format used by D3 for nearly all its output.

Both chapters are optional if you're already comfortable with these topics. Each appears in this book as a summary, with a topic overview to help you decide how much you need. You can access or download the full tutorial versions, complete with runnable code examples, from this book's GitHub repository.

If you are already comfortable with JavaScript and SVG, you can skip directly to Chapter 4, where you'll build your first complete D3 visualization.