Preface

I’ve always loved making games. Board games, role-playing games, computer games—I just love abstracting things into rules, numbers, and categories. As a natural consequence, I’ve always loved data visualization. Damage represented as a bar, spells represented with icons, territory broken down into hexes, treasure charted out in a variety of ways. But it wasn’t until I started working with maps in grad school that I became aware of the immeasurable time and energy people have invested in understanding how to best represent data.

I started learning D3 after having worked with databases, map data, and network data in a number of different desktop packages, and also coding in Flash. So I was naturally excited when I was introduced to D3, a JavaScript library that deals not only with information visualization generally, but also with the very specific domains of geospatial data and network data. The fact that it lives in the DOM and follows web standards was a bonus, especially because I’d been working with Flash, which wasn’t known for that kind of thing.