Getting Started with D3

Preface

The D3 JavaScript library allows us to make beautiful, interactive, browser-based data visualizations. By exposing the underlying elements of a web page in the context of a data set, D3 gives you complete control over your visualization. This fantastic power, though, comes with a short, sharp learning curve—a curve that this book aims to overcome.

By working through a collection of data sets, we will build up a series of visualizations, exposing new D3 concepts along the way. The data for this book has been gathered and made publicly available by the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) and details various aspects of New York’s transit system, comprising of historical tables, live data streams, and geographical information. By the end of the book, we will have visited some of the core aspects of D3, and will be properly equipped to build basic, interactive data visualizations on the Web.

Who This Book Is For

This is a little book aimed at the data scientist: someone who has data to visualize and who wants to use the power of the modern web browser to give his visualizations additional impact. This might be an academic who wants to escape the confines of the printed article, a statistician who needs to share their impressive results with the rest of her company, or the designer who wants to get his info-viz out far and wide on the Internet.

It’s assumed, therefore, that the reader is happy with coding and manipulating data. We will not cover any statistics or modelling, ...