Data Visualization with JavaScript

Chapter 7. Custom Visualizations with D3.js

In this book we’ve looked at many JavaScript libraries that were designed for specific types of visualizations. If you need a certain type of visualization for your web page and there’s a library that can create it, using that library is often the quickest and easiest way to create your visualization. There are drawbacks to such libraries, however. They all make assumptions about how the visualization should look and act, and despite the configuration options they provide, you don’t have complete control over the results. Sometimes that’s not an acceptable trade-off.

In this chapter, we’ll look at an entirely different approach to JavaScript visualizations, one that allows us to be creative and to retain ...