Learning D3 – essential skills for the Javascript Programmer

Recently I’ve been experimenting with and trying to learn the D3.js library in order to create ziplines and develop some relative expertise at Free Code Camp. D3 stands for Data Driven Documents. As a former cartographer and information graphic artist in the 90s, discovering the possibilities with D3 for browser based interactive applications is like Geraldo Rivera discovering Al Capone’s vault! (except he didn’t…) While it’s seemingly straightforward for those who have climbed the learning curve, “getting it” takes some experimentation, practice and intuition. Several reasonable tutorials exist for learning the library but its fair to say that whether one speaks to you at this moment depends on your prior javascript experience. My first attempt at creating a bar chart with D3 was held up mostly be json data extraction and a standard array…pretty basic data manipulation as far as javascript goes, but because all the existing D3 tutorials I found had explicitly named key:value pairs, it took me two days to figure out that d.name and d.value as used in the examples were the same thing as d[0] and d[1] in my simple nested array structure that did not have named keys. Small setbacks like that can be extremely frustrating, but it does seem it’s part of the learning experience. So here is my short, and growing list of fundamental D3 tasks that should help you learn to not just follow or copy a tutorial, but start to manipulate t...
Source: Mr. Hassle's Long Underpants - Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Tags: Computing D3 javascript Source Type: blogs