This chapter will introduce the D3.js (data-driven document) JavaScript library, describing its main features, explaining how it works, and showing how it drives data to transform documents. D3 contains an integrated set of tools that will help you bind data to graphical elements in a web page, in order to create scatterplots, bar charts, line charts, hierarchical node-link diagrams, networks, chord diagrams, sunburst charts, thematic geographic maps, or any interactive data visualization you can imagine. But D3.js is also a huge library, and is famous for having a steep learning curve. The goal of this book is to provide a learning path that will help you grasp its fundamental data-driven concepts and become familiar with its essential API.
In this chapter, you will learn how to set up your environment and test it by creating a very simple D3 application. It also includes a general overview of D3’s architecture, describing the relationships between its many modules and a brief description of each one.
This chapter will outline the following topics:
- D3 data-driven documents
- Using D3
- Modules microlibraries
