Preface

Learning Highcharts 4 aims to be the missing manual for Highcharts from every angle. It is written for web developers who would like to learn about Highcharts. This book has the following features:

• It is a step-by-step guide on building presentable charts from basic looking ones
• There are plenty of examples with real data covering all the Highcharts series types—line/spline, column, pie, donut, scatter, bubble, area range, column range, gauge, solid gauge, pyramid, box plot, spider, waterfall, funnel, error bar, heatmaps, and 3D charts
• Subject areas are included that haven't yet been covered in online reference manuals and demos, such as chart layout structure, color shading, and in-depth explanations of some specific options such as sizeBy in the bubble series, groupZPadding in the column series, and how to modify or create plugins
• Applications demonstrating how to create dynamic and interactive charts using Highcharts APIs and events handling are covered
• Applications demonstrating how to integrate Highcharts with a mobile framework such as jQuery Mobile and a Rich Internet Application framework such as Ext JS are also covered
• Applications demonstrating how to run Highcharts on the server side for automating charts generation and exporting their graphical outputs are also covered
• Using the latest online service Highcharts Cloud, you'll learn to embed the graphs into documents
• You'll also learn the structure of Highcharts plugins and how to create plugins

This book is not a reference manual as the Highcharts team has already done an excellent job in providing a comprehensive online reference, and each configuration is coupled with jsFiddle demos. This book also does not aim to be a chart design guide nor a tutorial on programming design with Highcharts.

In short, this book shows you what you can do with Highcharts.