Book Image

Google Visualization API Essentials

By : Traci Lynn Ruthkoski
Book Image

Google Visualization API Essentials

By: Traci Lynn Ruthkoski

Overview of this book

There's a lot of data in our world, and visual representations are often the best method of making sense of it all. Yet, it should not take an army of programmers and analysts to create visualizations in order to make data useful. The Google Visualization API is accessible to novice and advanced programmers alike, making data useful to more people."Google Visualization API Essentials" will show you how to create interactive data displays with very little code. The API, combined with Google Spreadsheets and Fusion Tables, is a complete system, from data management to analytical displays. Not only is it simple to learn, but the Google Visualization API can also be viewed as a first step to learning additional Google APIs."Google Visualization API Essentials" uses both methodology overviews and hands-on examples with real data to introduce chart and graph creation on the Google platform. Topics are presented from various aspects, including Google Spreadsheets and Fusion Tables, and Graphic User Interfaces. An overview of the various API development environments available to developers is also covered. Basic and advanced charts, data source connectivity, style formatting, and publishing options are also explored in depth."Google Visualization API Essentials" brings the arsenal of Google Visualizations into the web developer toolkit.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Your own visualization


In many ways, authoring a custom visualization is out of the scope of this book. However, it is worthwhile to be aware of the basic steps required to create a visualization from scratch, just in case a requirement for such a chart arises in the future. The general method of creating new visualizations involves knowledge of the HTML DOM (Document Object Model) and a reasonable amount of comfort working with programming abstraction.

To start, it is best to know some basic terminology that will be encountered when attempting to build a custom chart. As mentioned in Chapter 4, Basic Charts, the Google Visualization API is structured as an inheritance-based model. Classes of functions are realized through programming instances. The Visualization API charts, for example, barchart, geochart, areachart, and so on, become instances of a bundle of code when they are used in a program. In programming, the creation of an instance is taken care of by an element of code called the...