preface

Data is all around us and growing at an ever-increasing rate. It’s more important than ever before for businesses to deal with data quickly and effectively to understand their customers, monitor their processes, and support decision-making.

If Python and R are the kings of the data world, why, then, should you use JavaScript instead? What role does it play in business, and why do you need to read Data Wrangling with JavaScript?

I’ve used JavaScript myself in various situations. I started with it when I was a game developer building our UIs with web technologies. I soon graduated to Node.js backends to manage collection and processing of metrics and telemetry. We also created analytics dashboards to visualize the data we collected. By this stage we did full-stack JavaScript to support the company’s products.

My job at the time was creating game-like 3D simulations of construction and engineering projects, so we also dealt with large amounts of data from construction logistics, planning, and project schedules. I naturally veered toward JavaScript for wrangling and analysis of the data that came across my desk. For a sideline, I was also algorithmically analyzing and trading stocks, something that data analysis is useful for!