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)

Creating a bar chart with D3 and SVG

It's easy to create a horizontal bar chart in HTML. It's a bit trickier to make a vertical one, and quite challenging to create other charts, such as line charts, pie charts, and network diagrams, since HTML wasn't intended for vector graphics. While you can create such charts using HTML and CSS, it's not at all simple, nor is it recommended. You can, of course, use Canvas, but there are no graphical DOM elements to bind in Canvas. Canvas is used in D3 charts, but mostly for performance optimization. D3 works best with SVG.

The same bar chart that we created with HTML can be created with SVG. Do you think you can do it? Why not try it as an exercise before proceeding? You already learned how to use D3 and HTML, and you know the basics of SVG rectangles, attributes, and styles. That's all you need!

Most of the code is...