Preface

When I wrote the first edition of D3.js in Action, I did it mostly as a way to learn the library. I knew D3 well enough to do cool things with it, but like many people, I didn’t know the breadth and depth of it, nor did I really understand the structure of layouts and generators and its other aspects. I agreed to write the book as a sort of graduate school in D3, to become an expert in the library, and to become better at data visualization more generally. I came at the second edition from a different perspective. I knew D3 as well as most anyone could, and the changes from V3 to V4, while significant, were straightforward enough to explain. But in the last two and a half years, I’ve been a professional software developer, and I better understand where D3 sits in an ecosystem of applications and libraries. This time I didn’t set out to write a book to learn D3; this time I set out to write a book to teach people how to use D3, not only on its own but in reference to other libraries and to JavaScript.