Book Image

D3.js Quick Start Guide

By : Matthew Huntington
Book Image

D3.js Quick Start Guide

By: Matthew Huntington

Overview of this book

D3.js is a JavaScript library that allows you to create graphs and data visualizations in the browser with HTML, SVG, and CSS. This book will take you from the basics of D3.js, so that you can create your own interactive visualizations, to creating the most common graphs that you will encounter as a developer, scientist, statistician, or data scientist. The book begins with an overview of SVG, the basis for creating two-dimensional graphics in the browser. Once the reader has a firm understanding of SVG, we will tackle the basics of how to use D3.js to connect data to our SVG elements. We will start with a scatter plot that maps run data to circles on a graph, and expand our scatter plot to make it interactive. You will see how you can easily allow the users of your graph to create, edit, and delete run data by simply dragging and clicking the graph. Next, we will explore creating a bar graph, using external data from a mock API. After that, we will explore animations and motion with a bar graph, and use various physics-based forces to create a force-directed graph. Finally, we will look at how to use GeoJSON data to create a map.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Getting Started with D3.js

The era of big data is upon us! Advances in hardware have made it possible for computers to store, analyze, and transmit massive amounts of information in a way that was previously impossible. Data science has become one of the most in-demand fields in the United States, and companies are constantly coming up with new techniques to analyze customer information; it seems as if every day there are new ways to visualize all this data. D3 has become the most popular library used to create dynamic, interactive, data-driven visualizations on the web. Unlike many technologies previously used in data vizualization
, D3 leverages the power of combining SVG images with web browsers and JavaScript. In this chapter, we'll discuss the following topics:

  • What is SVG?
  • What makes D3 so special?
  • This book's approach to learning