Book Image

Learning D3.js 5 Mapping - Second Edition

By : Thomas Newton, Oscar Villarreal, Lars Verspohl
Book Image

Learning D3.js 5 Mapping - Second Edition

By: Thomas Newton, Oscar Villarreal, Lars Verspohl

Overview of this book

D3.js is a visualization library used for the creation and control of dynamic and interactive graphical forms. It is a library used to manipulate HTML and SVG documents as well as the Canvas element based on data. Using D3.js, developers can create interactive maps for the web, that look and feel beautiful. This book will show you how build and design maps with D3.js and gives you great insight into projections, colors, and the most appropriate types of map. The book begins by helping you set up all the tools necessary to build visualizations and maps. Then it covers obtaining geographic data, modifying it to your specific needs, visualizing it with augmented data using D3.js. It will further show you how to draw and map with the Canvas API and how to publish your visualization. By the end of this book, you'll be creating maps like the election maps and the kind of infographics you'll find on sites like the New York Times.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
6
Finding and Working with Geographic Data

Producing Graphics from Data - the Foundations of D3

We have acquired our toolbox and reviewed the basics of SVG. It is now time to explore D3.js. D3 is the evolution of the Protovis (http://mbostock.github.io/protovis/) library. If you have already delved into data visualization have been interested in making charts for your web application, you might have already used this library. Additional libraries also exist that can be differentiated by how quickly they rendered graphics and their compatibility with different browsers. For example, Internet Explorer did not support SVG but used its own implementation, VML. This made the Raphaël.js library an excellent option because it automatically mapped to either VML or SVG. On the other hand, jqPlot was easy to use, and its simplistic jQuery plugin interface allowed developers to adopt it very quickly.

However, Protovis had something...