Course on D3 by Roman Sahan (JS developer at Binary Studio)

2. What is data visualisation?
Data visualization is the presentation of data in a graphical format.

3. Why you should visualize data?
● Visuals are processed faster by the brain
● Visuals are committed to long-term memory easier than text
● Visuals can reveal patterns, trends, changes, and correlations
● Visuals can help simplify complex information
● Visuals can often be more effective than words at changing people’s
minds
● Visuals help people see things that were not obvious to them before

4. History
The concept of using pictures to understand data has been around for
centuries, from maps and graphs in the 17th century to the invention of the
pie chart in the early 1800s.

5. Nowadays
● HTML
● SVG
● Canvas

6. Data-driven documents
D3 (or D3.js) is a JavaScript library for visualizing data using web standards. D3
helps you bring data to life using SVG, Canvas and HTML.
It was created by Mike Bostock. He now works at the New York Times who
sponsors his open source work.

7. D3 is good at
● being general purpose visualization library
● providing a way to map data to documents
● handling data transformation
● providing basic math and layout algorithms

8. Why D3?
You choose how to visualize
https://bl.ocks.org/kerryrodden/raw/7090426/
https://bl.ocks.org/curran/raw/a9555f8041f04a5cbfb53e6f5c53caae/
https://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/raw/4062045/

9. Instalation
● via NPM:
npm install d3-selection
● load directly from d3js.org:
<script src="https://d3js.org/d3-selection.v1.min.js"></script>
npm install d3
<script src="https://d3js.org/d3.v4.js"></script>

10. D3 vs jQuery
d3.json('foo.json',
function(err, data) { });
d3.select('#foo')
.style('background', '#000')
.attr('height', '500')
.on('click', function() {})
.append('div');
$.getJSON('foo.json',
function(data) { });
$('#foo')
.css('background', '#000')
.attr('width', '500')
.click(function() {})
.append($('<div></div>'));

11. What is SVG?
● SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics
● SVG is used to define vector-based graphics for the Web
● SVG defines the graphics in XML format
● SVG graphics do NOT lose any quality if they are zoomed or resized
● Every element and every attribute in SVG files can be animated

12. SVG Shapes
● Rectangle <rect>
● Circle <circle>
● Ellipse <ellipse>
● Line <line>
● Polyline <polyline>
● Polygon <polygon>
● Path <path>
● Text <text>
https://codepen.io/sahanr/pen/JrLEEY

13. Selections
Selections allow powerful data-driven transformation of the document object
model (DOM).
const block = d3.select('.container');
const rectangles = block.selectAll('rect');
https://codepen.io/sahanr/pen/aLYOQr
Selections

14. Difference
Only selectAll has special behavior regarding grouping; select preserves the
existing grouping. The select method differs because there is exactly one
element in the new selection for each element in the old selection. Thus,
select also propagates data from parent to child, whereas selectAll does not
(hence the need for a data-join)!

15. Modifying Elements
const svg = d3
.select('svg')
.attr('name', 'container') // add attribute
.classed('green', true); // add class
const paragraphs = svg
.selectAll('text')
.filter(':nth-child(even)')
.style('text-decoration', 'underline') // add styles
.text('new inner text'); // added text
https://codepen.io/sahanr/pen/yzKeqV

16. Creating element
The append and insert methods are wrappers on top of select, so they also
preserve grouping and propagate data.
const svg = d3
.select('svg')
.append('rect') // add new element
.attr('y', 30) // modify <rect> element
.attr('x', 0);
svg.select('text)
.remove(); // remove first text element
https://codepen.io/sahanr/pen/aLYmgG

17. Bound to data
The magic of D3 comes from the ability to use data and web page elements
together.
Elements can be selected and their appearance modified to reflect differences
in the data.
Data is not a property of the selection, but a property of its elements (__data__
property).

18. The data join
● pairs an object and an element;
● keeps track of new and old objects;
● lets you animate differences
between new & old.
d3.selectAll('text')
.data(data)
.enter()
.append('text');

19. Binding data
const block = d3.select('.container')
.selectAll('p') // an enmpty selection, looking for data
.data(['first', 'second', 'third']); // data, which would be bound to selection
block
.enter() // for every time that we see data, but we do not see an element
.append('p') // append an element
.text(function (d) {
return d;
}); // fill the element with text
https://codepen.io/sahanr/pen/NaMPdm

20. Binding data
Data is bound to elements one of several ways:
● Joined to groups of elements via selection.data
● Assigned to individual elements via selection.datum
● Inherited from a parent via append, insert, or select

21. Loading data
d3-request
This module provides a convenient alternative to XMLHttpRequest.
d3.text("/path/to/file.txt", function(error, text) {
if (error) throw error;
console.log(text); // Hello, world!
});
d3.json()
d3.tsv()
d3.csv()
d3.xml()
d3.html()

22. svg output
https://codepen.io/sahanr/pen/KXopZZ?editors=0010

23. Scale
Scales are a convenient abstraction for a fundamental task in visualization:
mapping a dimension of abstract data to a visual representation.

24. Scale
var scores = [96, 74, 88, 65, 82 ];
const xScale = d3.scaleLinear()
.domain([0, d3.max(scores)]) -----> value range of the dataset
.range([0, 300]); ----------------> value range for the visualized graph
newItemGroup
.append('rect')
.attr('class', 'bar')
.attr('width', (d) => xScale(d))
.attr('height', barHeight - 5);
https://codepen.io/sahanr/pen/YraXeP

25. Scale types
● linear - https://codepen.io/sahanr/pen/MEVbRP
● time - https://codepen.io/sahanr/pen/wrmobr
● sequential- https://codepen.io/sahanr/pen/oGyrNV
● quantize- https://codepen.io/sahanr/pen/gGeLNm
● ordinal - https://codepen.io/sahanr/pen/BwrQgd

26. Handling events
We can bind an event listener to any DOM element using d3.selection.on()
method.
https://codepen.io/sahanr/pen/mBxJxP

27. Links
https://bost.ocks.org/mike/join/ - Thinking with Joins,
https://bost.ocks.org/mike/circles/ - Three Little Circles,
https://bost.ocks.org/mike/selection/ - How Selections Work,
https://github.com/d3 - D3 docs

28. To be continued...