This chapter covers fundamental standard web technologies used by D3: SVG, JavaScript (ES 2015), HTML Canvas and standard data formats such as JSON and CSV. It is intended as a general reference to these topics.
Most data visualizations created with D3.js generate SVG graphics. Good knowledge of SVG is important to make the most of D3, but you only really need to know the basics. It’s enough to know how to create simple shapes such as rectangles, circles, lines, and their attributes and styles. It’s also useful to understand how to apply transforms, such as translate, scale and rotate. This chapter includes a quick refresher on SVG that covers these essential topics and a bit more, since the more SVG you know, the more graphical resources you will have to create data visualizations using D3.
All the code examples in this book use ES 2015 (ES6...
