Data Visualization with JavaScript

Introduction

It’s getting hard to ignore the importance of data in our lives. Data is critical to the largest social organizations in human history (giants like Facebook and Google), and its collection has widespread geopolitical implications, as we all saw with the NSA surveillance scandal. But it’s also getting easier to ignore the data itself. One estimate suggests that 99.5% of the data our systems collect goes to waste.

Data visualization is a tool that addresses this gap. Effective visualizations clarify; they transform abstract collections of numbers into shapes and forms that viewers quickly grasp and understand. The best visualizations impart this understanding intuitively. Viewers comprehend the data immediately—without thinking. This ...