Most of the available data we have access to is in the form of numbers, tables, and Excel spreadsheets. Wouldn't it be great if all this data magically sprung up colorful charts, graphs, and clouds? The D3 JavaScript library is that magic wand to get all the work done with a wave of your hand or a few lines of code. Everything you require to make your data display in aesthetic awe can be achieved using D3JS.
Rapid D3JS begins with setting up your development environment, and then dives into how data binding works and how it's similar to jQuery. We'll take a look at building a football fan site and using spreadsheet data (TSV) to build a team roster, and learn about scaling, drawing axes, data manipulation, and even how to animate bars in five amazingly simple lines of code.
Driving HTML tables is nice, but what we really want to see is graphics. So next, we'll build a histogram from a CSV file of goals scored over the season. But D3 isn't just for building tables or creating graphs. You can also build a website framework driven from a CSV file. We'll also be creating a simple Bootstrap menu, and the possibilities demonstrated by this quick mini project are limitless.
Finally, we'll take a couple of sample D3 visualizations such as Word Cloud and Sunburst and incorporate our data into them. Last but not least, we'll see how to build a website menu framework and techniques on how to utilize third-party visualizations within it.
This video course will take you from the foundational bindings of Data-driven Documents to understanding strategies to create and extend amazing visualizations.
About the Author
Michael Westbay graduated from San Diego State University with a BS degree in computer science and a minor in Japanese studies. Upon graduation, he moved to Japan to work for a software company mainly dealing with databases. After 15 years at that company, he branched out and started working independently connecting databases and web technologies.
Most of what Michael has written about has been about Japanese baseball, having started a blog (before blogs existed) in 1995. That eventually led to writing a column for a Japanese baseball magazine for a couple of years, relying heavily on his own baseball database for the article.
He was an early adopter of Netscape Navigator 2.0's JavaScript, seeing the potential of dynamic pages early on. Unfortunately, his experience dealing with IE 4 on a time card system in 1997 soured him on JavaScript for a number of years. He then concentrated on server-side technologies and had a number of articles published in Japanese web and database periodicals.
As third-party JavaScript frameworks conquered the incompatibilities Microsoft built into their own version of ECMAScript, Michael slowly came back to the dynamic scripting scene. jQuery and its ecosystem of plug-ins won him back full time, but it doesn't compare to the power and elegance of D3Js. Crossfilter and dcJS look to be the next step in his never-ending pursuit of knowledge.
