A Primer on DOM, SVG, and CSS

You might already be used to manipulating DOM and CSS with libraries such as jQuery; if so, much of this will seem very familiar, as D3 has a full suite of manipulation tools. If not, don't worry, as this chapter exists to get everyone up to speed.

Very similar to HTML's DOM is the SVG namespace, which we'll use for most of the examples in this book. SVG is at the core of building truly great visualizations, so we'll take special care to understand it, starting out by manually drawing shapes and then doing the same using D3's path generators in Chapter 3, Shape Primitives of D3.

In this chapter, we'll take a look at the core technologies that make D3 tick. They are as follows:

Document Object Model (DOM)
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

Steve Gailey Sep 27, 2017

Impenetrable. The author jumps right in without even making clear what you should already know. this is a book for someone very familiar with modern Javascript and with the V3 D3 libraries, not someone who knows javascript a little and is not familiar with D3.

Amazon Verified review

DanBy Jul 27, 2017

Having reached the halfway point with this book I have to say this is among the poorer tech tutorial/guides I've read.Although the book claims otherwise this would be hard to follow without a fair prior understanding of javascript. If you are not at least passingly familiar with contemporary functional javascript large tracts of the text will be quite mystifying as the functional idioms used are never adequately explained. I would imagine for more novice programmers having to deal with the cognitive load of unpicking that code while also trying to learn the example d3 components would be very frustrating.Speaking of frustrating if you attempt to follow the code examples as written in the book you'll quickly discover they often do not work as written. Lines, keywords and statements are omitted in the text and these omissions usually break the examples. Some of these are trivial to fix but many fixes were only possible by comparing the code I was writing out of the book with the code in git repo they offer. And worth noting the code in the git repo frequently diverges from that in the book (mostly trivially but sometimes inexplicably so and without explanation). I seems to me that no one can have sat down and worked through the example in the book once the text was finished. To my mind this is inexcusable in this kind of technical text.In general I found the tone of the text assumes that you are always able to understand the examples, and maybe also the author might find it confusing that you don't immediately understand. This would be fine for a book pitched at an expert audience but not so useful for people with "some basic knowledge of javascript... [and] no prior experience with data visualization or D3" (to quote the intro). I suspect the authors would be better placed to write a text on best practices for functional d3.I bought the kindle edition and the text was also very, very poorly formatted with lines of code out of place and other line formatting errors.

D3.js 4.x Data Visualization: Learn to visualize your data with JavaScript , Third Edition

What do you get with Print?

D3.js 4.x Data Visualization

A Primer on DOM, SVG, and CSS

DOM

What exactly did we do here?

Scalable Vector Graphics

CSS

DOM

Page 1 of 6

Key benefits

Description

Who is this book for?

What you will learn

Product Details

What do you get with Print?

Product Details

Frequently bought together

Table of Contents

Recommendations for you

Customer reviews

People who bought this also bought

About the authors

FAQs

D3.js 4.x Data Visualization: Learn to visualize your data with JavaScript , Third Edition

What do you get with Print?

Contact Details

Shipping Address

Billing Address

Key benefits

Description

Who is this book for?

What you will learn

Product Details

What do you get with Print?

Contact Details

Shipping Address

Billing Address

Product Details

Packt Subscriptions

Frequently bought together

Table of Contents

Recommendations for you

Customer reviews

People who bought this also bought

About the authors

FAQs