Book Image

Learn D3.js

By : Helder da Rocha
2 (1)
Book Image

Learn D3.js

2 (1)
By: Helder da Rocha

Overview of this book

This book is a practical hands-on introduction to D3 (Data-driven Documents): the most popular open-source JavaScript library for creating interactive web-based data visualizations. Based entirely on open web standards, D3 provides an integrated collection of tools for efficiently binding data to graphical elements. If you have basic knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript you can use D3.js to create beautiful interactive web-based data visualizations. D3 is not a charting library. It doesn’t contain any pre-defined chart types, but can be used to create whatever visual representations of data you can imagine. The goal of this book is to introduce D3 and provide a learning path so that you obtain a solid understanding of its fundamental concepts, learn to use most of its modules and functions, and gain enough experience to create your own D3 visualizations. You will learn how to create bar, line, pie and scatter charts, trees, dendograms, treemaps, circle packs, chord/ribbon diagrams, sankey diagrams, animated network diagrams, and maps using different geographical projections. Fundamental concepts are explained in each chapter and then applied to a larger example in step-by-step tutorials, complete with full code, from hundreds of examples you can download and run. This book covers D3 version 5 and is based on ES2015 JavaScript.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Essential Javascript data structures

Data used as sources for visualizations is usually organized in some kind of structure. The most common structures are probably lists (arrays) and tables (maps), stored in some standard data format. When using data from external sources, you usually need to clean it up, removing unnecessary values, simplifying its structure, applying bounds, etc. After that you can parse it and finally store it locally in a JavaScript array or JavaScript object that can be used by the chart.

Once your data is stored in a JavaScript data structure, you can transform it further applying mathematical operations on the stored values. It’s useful to have a good knowledge of the main data structures used in JavaScript: arrays, objects, functions, strings, maps and sets, since your data will probably be in one of these formats. This section describes each one...