Interactive Data Visualization for the Web, 2nd Edition

Preface

This is a book about programming data visualizations for nonprogrammers. If you’re an artist or graphic designer with visual skills but no prior experience working with data or code, this book is for you. If you’re a journalist or researcher with lots of data but no prior experience working with visuals or code, this book is for you, too.

This book will introduce you to D3, a JavaScript-based tool for loading data into a web page and generating visuals from that data. I assume that you have little or no programming experience. Or, perhaps you have programmed before, but D3 and data visualization are bringing you to JavaScript for the first time, and you’ve heard bad things about it. Well, JavaScript is a little weird, but it’s not as bad as you’ve heard, and everything is going to be all right. Please sit down and make yourself comfortable.

This book began as a series of tutorials posted on my website. At the time (January 2012), there wasn’t much information on D3 available that was accessible to beginners. Very quickly, I was getting hundreds, then thousands of page views a day—evidence that interest in the field generally (and in D3 specifically) was growing like gangbusters. I expanded the tutorials into the first edition of this book, published in March 2013. Since then, the D3 community has been growing by leaps and bounds. Demand for D3 skills overwhelmed the D3 Google Group with so many job postings that early D3 aficionado Lynn Cherny spun off a new group dedicated ...