Part 2. The pillars of information visualization

The next five chapters provide an exhaustive look into the layouts, components, behaviors, and controls that D3 provides to create the varieties of data visualization you’ve seen all over the web. In chapter 4 you’ll learn how to create line and area charts, deploying D3 axes to make them readable, as well as how to build complex multipart boxplots that encode several different data variables at the same time. Chapter 5 walks through seven different D3 layouts, from the simple pie chart to the exotic Sankey diagram, and shows you how to implement each layout in a few different ways. Chapter 6 focuses entirely on representing network structures, showing you how to visualize them using arc diagrams, adjacency matrices, and force-directed layouts, and introduces several new techniques like SVG markers. Chapter 7 also focuses on a single domain, this time geospatial data, and demonstrates how to leverage D3’s incredible geospatial functionality to build different kinds of maps. Chapter 8 shifts to creating more traditional DOM elements using D3 data-binding that result in a spreadsheet and simple image gallery. Whether you’re interested in all of these areas or diving deeply into just one, part 2 provides you with the tools to represent any kind of data using advanced data visualization not available in standard charting libraries and applications.