Data Visualization with Python and JavaScript

Preface

The chief ambition of this book is to describe a data visualization (dataviz) toolchain that, in the era of the Internet, is starting to predominate. The guiding principle of this toolchain is that whatever insightful nuggets you have managed to mine from your data deserve a home on the web browser. Being on the Web means you can easily choose to distribute your dataviz to a select few (using authentication or restricting to a local network) or the whole world. This is the big idea of the Internet and one that dataviz is embracing at a rapid pace. And that means that the future of dataviz involves JavaScript, the only first-class language of the web browser. But JavaScript does not yet have the data-processing stack needed to refine raw data, which means data visualization is inevitably a multi-language affair. I hope this book provides ammunition for my belief that Python is the natural complementary language to JavaScript’s monopoly of browser visualizations.

Although this book is a big one (that fact is felt most keenly by the author right now), it has had to be very selective, leaving out a lot of very cool Python and JavaScript dataviz tools and focusing on the ones I think provide the best building blocks. The number of cool libraries I couldn’t cover reflects the enormous vitality of the Python and JavaScript data science ecosystems. Even while the book was being written, brilliant new Python and JavaScript libraries were being introduced, and the pace continues. ...