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


As a data visualization developer, one key task that you need to perform over and over is to map values from your data domain to visual domain, for example, mapping your most recent purchase of a fancy tablet of $453.00 to a 653px-long bar, and your last night's pub bill of $23.59 to a 34px-long bar, respectively. In a sense, this is what data visualization is all about—mapping data elements to their visual metaphor in an efficient and accurate manner. Because this is an absolutely essential task in data visualization and animation (animation will be discussed in Chapter 6, Transition with Style, in detail), D3 provides rich and robust support on this topic, which is the focus of this chapter.

What are scales?

D3 provides various constructs called scales to help you perform this kind of mapping. Proper understanding of these constructs conceptually is crucial to become an effective visualization developer. This is because scales are not only used to perform the mapping we have...