Description
Book SynopsisRitchie S. King is a reporter and visual journalist at FiveThirtyEight.com, focusing on data visualization and interactive features. He previously held a similar role at Quartz. In a previous life, he was a chemical engineer at a start-up trying to turn wood chips and switchgrass into fuel. Though he left engineering to become a journalist, he's still into math and likes to muck with data. His written stories and graphics have appeared in the New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, Popular Science, and IEEE Spectrum.
Table of ContentsForeword xi Preface xiii Acknowledgments xvii About the Author xix Chapter 1: Visual Storytelling and D3 1 Visualization, Visualized 1 Charts Give Data a Form–That Form Tells a Story 2 Quality: It Is All about Content 5 Design: It Is All about Form 6 Visual Storytelling 7 Enter D3 7 Things You Designers Will Love about D3 8 Things You Coders Will Love about D3 8 Things for Which You Should Not Use D3 9 Notes on Using D3 9 Tools You Will Need 10 Summary 10 Chapter 2: Finding a Data-Driven Story and Telling It Visually 11 Getting Started 11 Is the World Getting Older? 12 Finding and Inspecting Data 13 Honing the Concept 15 Choosing a Form 17 The Example We Will Build in This Book 27 Summary 29 Chapter 3: Scalable Vector Graphics 31 Peeking under the Hood 31 What Is SVG, Exactly? 31 Playing with Circles in SVG 32 Inspecting SVG in the Web Inspector 34 Styling SVG Elements with CSS 35 Other Shapes 37 SVG Text 41 SVG Style Properties 44 Drawing Order and Groups 47 Transformations 49 Building a Bar Chart in SVG 51 Summary 64 Chapter 4: Shaping Web Pages with D3 Selections 65 Getting Set Up with D3 65 Making Selections 66 Changing a Selection’s Attributes 70 D3 Strives to be Declarative 74 Chaining Methods 74 Appending New Elements 77 Putting It All Together 79 Selecting Multiple Elements with d3.selectAll() 80 Building a Bar Chart with Selections 81 Summary 103 Chapter 5: Data-Joins: Enter 105 What Are Data-Joins? 105 A Conceptual Overview of Data-Joins: Enter 106 Enter and Binding Data 107 Using a Data-Join to Make a Bar Chart 111 Using Anonymous Functions to Access Bound Data 115 Finishing the Rest of the Chart 119 Storing Data in Objects 120 Summary 125 Chapter 6: Sizing Charts and Adding Axes 127 Linear Scales 127 Using Smart Margin Conventions 132 Adding Axes 135 Ordinal Scales and Axes 144 Summary 156 Chapter 7: Loading and Filtering External Data 157 Building a Graphic that Uses All of the Population Distribution Data 157 Data Formats You Can Use with D3 158 Creating a Server to Upload Your Data 159 D3’s Functions for Loading Data 160 Dealing with Asynchronous Requests 165 Loading and Filtering a Large(r) Data Set 171 Putting It All Together 173 Summary 175 Chapter 8: Making Charts Interactive and Animated 177 Data-Joins: Update and Exit 177 Interactive Buttons 181 Updating Charts 190 Adding Transitions 193 Using Keys 196 Summary 197 Chapter 9: Adding a Play Button 199 Wrapping the Update Phase in a Function 199 Adding a Play Button to the Page 203 Making the Play Button Go 204 Allowing the User to Interrupt the Play Sequence 207 Summary 213 Chapter 10: Striking Out on Your Own 215 This Book is a Foundation for Learning D3 215 How to Get Unstuck 215 Always Be Coding 217 Summary 218 Appendix A: JavaScript for Beginners 219 JavaScript in Brief 219 Your Browser’s JavaScript Console 219 Basic Math, Variables, and Data Types 220 Writing JavaScript in Markup and .js Files 223 Arrays and Objects 224 Methods and Functions 227 If Statements and for Loops 228 Debugging 232 Appendix B: Cleaning the Population Distribution Data 235 Index 255
