Mastering D3.js Illustrated Edition

The book is ok, at first I had trouble understanding the repository. But following the explanations carefully, everything its OK. Not a beginner book; very useful for people who has some experience with d3 and data visualization.

Great section on making modules for tooltips that I'd never thought of. Taught me a lot about organizing code, testing, and streamlining with developer tools like grunt.

Mastering D3.js covers a number of topics that can be used to really enhance a project. This book goes beyond just some D3 charts; Mastering D3.js provides examples of implementing D3.js into Backbone and Node.js applications for interactive and real-time charts. The combination of numerous accessor methods, Node.js and Backbone integration, and creating a charting package is very useful for creating a separate component that can be implemented in future projects.The dashboard chapter was really good in my opinion. In applications with a lot of data on users for example, dashboards can be a great way to display the data. This book covers some best practices when designing dashboards and also gives some direction on furthering your knowledge on data visualizations.Some of the more advanced topics include the use of maps and different types of projection. Another is using real-time data which includes Node.js, Backbone, Socket.IO, and the twitter streaming API. the tutorial will bring you through both the server and client side of creating the real time data visualization application.I think the book was well written but there were a few things that could have made it even better. Unless you’re just skimming the book for a quick tutorial on how to accomplish a feature, the source code is pretty much necessary for following along with the examples. Also, the source code was not exactly the most friendly to run easily locally on your machine. A lot of the source could have been produced in a similar way to Data Visualization with D3.js Cookbook where it could be seen running locally just by launching it in your browser.If you plan on using multiple data visualizations in a project or one complex data visualization in multiple projects this book is definitely an asset. If you’ve purchased or are thinking of purchasing the book from somewhere other than PacktPub, contact them for the source files, they will definitely help going through the examples. If you don’t have prior experience with D3.js or are just looking for some data visualization examples to work off of I would recommend Data Visualization with D3.js Cookbook.

I couldn't make heads or tails of this book. I downloaded the files but the download ends in .zip.html, which opens into a webpage of garbage. Removing the .html extension fixes that, but then the file names don't match the files referred to in the book. The GitHub repository [...] has the same incorrectly named files. The book refers to 'chapter02/01-creating-dom-elements.html'. I found 'chapter02/01-creating-dom-elements.md' but it's nothing like what the book is talking about. I found 'dist/mastering-d3-html/chapter02/01-creating-dom-elements/index.html' but it looks nothing like the code in the book. I tried typing the code that's in the book. Then the book says to type this JavaScript in the Chrome Dev Tools browser:var p = d3. select(' body'). append(' p');That results in an error message: "d3 not defined." The code doesn't link to the D3 library. Nowhere does the book suggest linking to the D3 library.Another reviewer had problems with the files and the author responded that the code in the book is just snippets due to space restrictions. OK, I'll assume that the downloadable files are correct, and the book has the wrong filenames, wrong paths, the code snippets don't look anything like the files, and the downloaded file has the wrong extension. I contacted the publisher, who assured me that the downloaded files were correct.This book wasted two hours of my time. I'm now happily working through O'Reilly's "Interactive Data Visualization for the Web," by Scott Murray. Maybe I'll come back to "Mastering D3" after I've finished the O'Reilly book.

The topics cover a well-needed area with D3.js development. Unfortunately, the execution of this book is poor. Specifically, code is skipped over in the text, which is to be expected. However, the author did not provide a code repository with working examples. There is a repo, but it seems unfinished and is for the "upcoming book."

If you're on the journey from D3 amateur to D3 master, this is the book you need to take your visualizations to the next level. I really enjoyed how he emphasized breaking out code into configurable, re-usable pieces. While I had some trouble getting the code samples up and running (hint: download the html zip from the GitHub repo), once I did, they were excellent for really diving into the discussion and understanding what was happening. Doing this also helped me to dissect how the code was written and question my knowledge of how certain things worked. Overall, great book!

This book is for frontend programmers who want to learn how to create charts, visualizations, and interactive maps with D3. We will cover everything from creating basic charts to complex real-time applications, integrating other libraries and components to create real-life applications.