Appendix. A tutorial on D3.js
This appendix covers
- A brief tutorial on D3.js, one of the popular open source JavaScript libraries for data visualization
- The graph visualization capability of the library
- Creating a simple graph visualization application using D3.js
D3 stands for Data-Driven Documents and is an extremely popular way to visualize data in a browser. It was designed by Mike Bostock in 2011 in an effort to separate the data layer of visualization from the visualization itself. This enables a programmer to allow for multiple visualizations of the same data on the same HTML page and facilitate interaction between them. This is not to say that D3 eliminates the need for a database—it’s only intended to hold the data that you want to show on the page at that time, and there are memory and bandwidth considerations to how much data it’s realistic to hold in a browser. D3.js has been used to create powerful and beautiful visualizations and is used in hundreds of web applications in many different industries. I encourage you to take a look at some of the examples at http://www.d3js.org.