Book Image

Data Visualization with D3.js Cookbook

By : Nick Zhu
Book Image

Data Visualization with D3.js Cookbook

By: Nick Zhu

Overview of this book

D3.js is a JavaScript library designed to display digital data in dynamic graphical form. It helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG, and CSS. D3 allows great control over the final visual result, and it is the hottest and most powerful web-based data visualization technology on the market today. "Data Visualization with D3.js Cookbook" is packed with practical recipes to help you learn every aspect of data visualization with D3. "Data Visualization with D3.js Cookbook" is designed to provide you with all the guidance you need to get to grips with data visualization with D3. With this book, you will create breathtaking data visualization with professional efficiency and precision with the help of practical recipes, illustrations, and code samples. "Data Visualization with D3.js Cookbook" starts off by touching upon data visualization and D3 basics before gradually taking you through a number of practical recipes covering a wide range of topics you need to know about D3. You will learn the fundamental concepts of data visualization, functional JavaScript, and D3 fundamentals including element selection, data binding, animation, and SVG generation. You will also learn how to leverage more advanced techniques such as custom interpolators, custom tweening, timers, the layout manager, force manipulation, and so on. This book also provides a number of pre-built chart recipes with ready-to-go sample code to help you bootstrap quickly.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Data Visualization with D3.js Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


In this chapter, we are going to explore the most essential question in any data visualization project, how data can be represented both in programming constructs, and its visual metaphor. Before we start on this topic, some discussion on what data visualization is is necessary. In order to understand what data visualization is, first we need to understand the difference between data and information.

Data are raw facts. The word raw indicates that the facts have not yet been processed to reveal their meaning...Information is the result of processing raw data to reveal its meaning.

(Rob P., S. Morris, and Coronel C. 2009)

This is how data and information are traditionally defined in the digital information world. However, data visualization provides a much richer interpretation of this definition since information is no longer the mere result of processed raw facts but rather a visual metaphor of the facts. As suggested by Manuel Lima in his Information Visualization Manifesto that...