Book Image

Learning Highcharts

Book Image

Learning Highcharts

Overview of this book

Highcharts is a popular web charting software that produces stunning and smooth animated JavaScript and HTML5 SVG graphs. It is among the leading web charting software in the market and has been used in many different sectors ó from financial to social websites. Although it is built on top of jQuery, it is so simple to construct that you need little programming skill to create a simple web chart. Highcharts works on all modern browsers and is solely based on native browser technologies and doesn't require client side plugins like Flash or Java."Learning Highcharts" is a comprehensive tutorial with clear and practical examples. This book follows a step by step approach towards making artistic, presentable, or professional style charts and other types of charts that you won't find elsewhere. It also shows you how to integrate Highcharts with other popular frameworks, such as jQuery, jQuery Mobile, and ExtJS and even how to run it on the server side.The book starts off with an introduction to Highcharts and demonstrates usage of its rich set of options. This is followed by an introduction to each type of basic chart, beginning with simple illustrations and ending with more artistic and productive additions to the charts. The book then guides you how to use the Highcharts API and events handling which are important to build interactive applications. It then goes on to show you how to apply Highcharts onto a popular AJAX Framework or even jQuery, jQuery Mobile and Ext JS. Finally the book shows readers how to set up Highcharts running on server side. "Learning Highcharts" aims to teach you everything you need to know about Highcharts, and take the advanced leap from Flash to JavaScript, with this extremely productive and effective Charting software available, thus helping you build basic charts and even multiple series and axes charts. The book also shows you the flexibility of Highcharts and how to create other special charts. The programming side of APIs and event handling will benefit the readers in building advanced web applications with Highcharts. The book also guides readers on how to integrate Highcharts with popular frameworks such as jQuery Mobile and Ext JS. By the end of the book, you should be able to use Highcharts to suit your web page or application needs.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Learning Highcharts
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 1. Web Charts

In this chapter you will learn the general background of web charts. This includes a short history of how web charts used to be made before Ajax and HTML5 became the new standard. The recent advancement in JavaScript programming will be briefly discussed. Then the new HTML5 features—SVG and canvas, which are the main drive behind JavaScript charts, are introduced and demonstrated. This is followed by a quick guide on the other JavaScript graphing packages that are available on the market. Finally, an introduction of Highcharts is given, which explains the advantages of Highcharts over the other products. In this chapter we will cover the following:

  • A short history of web charting

  • The uprising of JavaScript and HTML5

  • JavaScript charts on the market

  • Why Highcharts?

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