When learning d3.js on your own, there is often a feeling of Step 1: Draw two circles, Step 2: Draw the rest of the owl. This book tries to bridge that gap.
It uses complete examples that take you from basic shapes on a page to full-blown examples. There is no magic here, no steps are left unexplained. You will understand everything that goes into making a visualization with d3.js.
We'll touch everything from manipulating data to make it easier to work with, to using advanced features to separate drawing from calculating coordinates.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with d3.js, gives a simple example to show you the basics of d3.js and helps you to set up a common environment, which is used throughout the rest of the book.
Chapter 2, A Primer on DOM, SVG, and CSS, explains in detail how to use d3.js for manipulating content on a page, paying special attention to SVG and the core tools for creating images.
Chapter 3, Making Data Useful, shows you how to manipulate data in a functional manner, load data from external sources, and use the built-in tools of d3.js to avoid tedious coding.
Chapter 4, Making Things Move, talks about animating visualizations with d3.js and allowing users to interact with your images.
Chapter 5, Layouts – d3's Black Magic, explains how d3.js layouts work and shows you how to use the same dataset to get vastly different images. The fancy visualizations out there will no longer look like magic.
Chapter 6, Designing Good Visualizations, looks at a few examples of great visualizations from around the web and discusses just what it is that makes them great.
You don't need much to play along with the examples. A machine geared for web development will have everything.
We assumed the Chrome browser in the examples, but everything should work in Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer Version 10 and above. The specific browser only affects how your debugging tools work, but they're very similar in all browsers anyway.
We also use Python to run a small server. If you're using Mac or Linux, Python is already installed; otherwise, you've to get a version. The only thing we ever do with Python is run a single command.
And lastly, you are going to need a text editor. Personally I like Emacs, but Sublime and Notepad++ are also popular choices. Yes, you can use Vim too.
This book is for everyone who's tried learning d3.js on their own, looked at a few examples and thought: "What the hell is this magic?".
The book assumes you've written some JavaScript before, are relatively comfortable with web development in general, have a firm grasp of programming basics, and have looked at d3.js examples before. By the end of this book, you will be able to understand code from even the fanciest visualizations.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "At the end, we include a code.js file where we'll put most of our code "
A block of code is set as follows:
data = d3.keys(data).map(function (key) {
return {bucket: Number(key),
N: data[key]};
});Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
> topojson -o water.json ne_50m_rivers_lake_centerlines.shp ne_50m_ocean.shp > topojson -o land.json ne_50m_land.shp > topojson -o cultural.json ne_50m_admin_0_boundary_lines.shp ne_10m_urban_areas.shp
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: " You'll find them in the Downloads tab".
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