Data Visualization with Python and JavaScript

Introduction

This book aims to get you up to speed with what is, in my opinion, the most powerful data visualization stack going: Python and JavaScript. You’ll learn enough about big libraries like Pandas and D3 to start crafting your own web data visualizations and refining your own toolchain. Expertise will come with practice, but this book presents a shallow learning curve to basic competence.

Note

If you’re reading this, I’d love to hear any feedback you have. Please post it to [e-mail]. Thanks a lot.

You’ll also find a working copy of the Nobel visualization the book literally and figuratively builds toward at http://kyrandale.com/static/pyjsdataviz/index.html.

The bulk of this book tells one of the innumerable tales of data visualization, one carefully selected to showcase some powerful Python and JavaScript libraries and tools which together form a toolchain. This toolchain gathers raw, unrefined data at its start and delivers a rich, engaging web visualization at its end. Like all tales of data visualization, it is a tale of transformation—in this case, transforming a basic Wikipedia list of Nobel Prize winners into an interactive visualization, bringing the data to life and making exploration of the prize’s history easy and fun.

A primary motivation for writing the book is the belief that, whatever data you have and whatever story you want to tell with it, the natural home for the visualizations you transform it into is the Web. As a delivery platform, ...