If you don't know what D3 is, the
short answer is "a Javascript library people use to make
cool
charts". The long answer is, as expected, much longer. This
tutorial hopes to bridge some of that distance. It is a
work-in-progress.
D3 is a powerful tool, but you know how that saying goes: "With great
power comes a conceptually clean library with a learning curve like
a wall". Or something like that. D3 has a base consisting of few
concepts - selections, data, and values - but it builds a smorgasbord
of powerful features on top of that. And if your understanding in that
base is a little unstable, you might find yourself confused more often
than enlightened.
Because D3 is really a beautiful little library, enlightening in how
it solves the problem of turning data into documents. And it would
be a shame if you didn't enjoy using it.
This tutorial assumes you know about HTML and CSS, as well as some
JS. It doesn't do anything too fancy with JS, but I'm not
feeling up to the challenge of teaching both a programming language
and a library for it that is, roughly, another language. One is
enough for me, thank you very much.
You won't need any tools, though to play along at home I'd recommend
getting the library, setting up a
skeleton page that
includes it, and becoming comfortable with the JS console in your
browser of choice.
0.1 Preface