JavaScript and jQuery for Data Analysis and Visualization

Chapter 9Exploring Charting Tools

What's in This Chapter

• Building a chart using the HTML5 canvas element from the ground up
• Learning the basics of linear interpolation and how it relates to practically everything in charting
• Using key frame animation and easing functions to create pleasing transitions in a chart
• Using the Google Charts API to make everything easier
• Displaying bar, line, and pie visualizations using the Google Charts API.

CODE DOWNLOAD The wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found at www.wrox.com/go/javascriptandjqueryanalysis on the Download Code tab. The code is in the chapter 09 download and individually named according to the names throughout the chapter.

Chapter 3, “Building a Visualization Foundation,” covers the breadth of charting visualizations, which can be used to tell the desired story with your data. This chapter takes a deep dive into how to actually implement these visualizations.

Building charting visualizations can be a daunting task, even with high-quality charting tools making things as simple as possible. This is because charting application programming interfaces (APIs) need to be quite complex in order to grant you the flexibility to achieve all the scenarios that might be important to you. As with anything complicated, the best strategy for understanding something is to break things down, understand all the smaller moving parts, and then put things together again.

To facilitate this, you start this chapter by building ...