One of the main changes in this edition is the emphasis on ES2016, the most modern version of JavaScript currently available. Unfortunately, functional programming goes beyond the scope of this article, but I’ll explain all the relevant bits to make sure that everyone’s on the same page. Try it out at .Īs a data manipulation library, D3 is based on the principles of functional programming, which is probably where a lot of confusion stems from. It allows users to easily build basic line, pie, area, and bar charts without writing any code. One such interface is Axis, an open source app that I’ve written. This also means that it’s not very suitable for simple jobs such as drawing a line chart or two-in that case you might want to use a library designed for charting. The fine-grained control and its elegance make D3 one of the most-if not the most-powerful open source visualization libraries out there. If you want to follow the development of D3 more closely, check out the source code hosted on GitHub at. After finishing this article, you should be able to understand D3 well enough to figure out the examples. The official website,, features many great examples that show off the power of D3, but understanding them is tricky at best. Especially within the context of data visualization, this declarative approach makes using it easier and more enjoyable than a lot of other tools out there. Much like jQuery, in D3, you operate on elements by selecting them and then manipulating via a chain of modifier functions. D3’s idioms should be immediately familiar to anyone with experience of using the massively popular jQuery JavaScript library. The successor to Bostock’s earlier Protovis library, it allows pixel-perfect rendering of data by abstracting the calculation of things such as scales and axes into an easy-to-use domain-specific language ( DSL). (For more resources related to this topic, see here.) What is D3.js?ĭ3 stands for Data-Driven Documents, and it is being developed by Mike Bostock and the D3 community since 2011. We’ll then cover the basics of using D3 to render a basic chart. I’ll explain how you can start writing ECMAScript 2016 ( ES2016) today-which is the latest and most advanced version of JavaScript-and show you how to use Babel to transpile it to ES5, allowing your modern JavaScript to be run on any browser. In this article by Ændrew Rininsland, author of the book Learning d3.js Data Visualization, Second Edition, we’ll lay the foundations of what you’ll need to run all the examples in the article.
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