D3 Start to Finish teaches you how to build a custom, interactive and beautiful data visualisation using the JavaScript library D3.js (versions 6 and 7).

The book covers D3 concepts such as selections, joins, requests, scale functions, event handling and transitions. It also covers general web development techniques such as state management and modularisation. In other words, everything you need to know to build a real world, custom data visualisation.

You'll also learn how to put these concepts into practice by building an interactive data visualisation called Energy Explorer. This is a custom data visualisation that visualises the energy mix of 141 countries. There are 15 separate build steps and you're taken through each step in detail. There's also a code download link for all 15 steps so you can follow along.

Some of the topics covered are:

• requesting CSV data using D3
• D3 data joins (including joining nested data)
• architecting a data visualisation using a layout function
• detailed styling using CSS
• adding a popup using Flourish's popup library
• state management
• animations using D3 transitions
• data manipulation using Lodash
• adding a menu, legend and footer

To get the most out of this book you need to be familiar with HTML, SVG, CSS and JavaScript. If you need to get up to speed with these languages I recommend my book Fundamentals of HTML, CSS, SVG & JavaScript for Data Visualisation. I've bundled both books together at a reduced cost (visit bundle).

You’ll also need a text editor (such as VS Code or Brackets), a local web server and a web browser. The book contains two appendices that help you get these set up.

To keep things simple build tools such as webpack aren't used. If you'd like to cover ES2015 modules, webpack and other advanced topics have a look at the Advanced Edition package. D3 version 7 is used in this book.

Advanced Edition

The Advanced edition contains additional material including:

• how to transform the raw data from the World Bank into the required format
• how to make Energy Explorer responsive to different device sizes
• how to add dark mode to Energy Explorer
• ES2015 modules and webpack
• how to make Energy Explorer using ES2015 modules and webpack

The Advanced edition is for experienced developers and requires familiarity with Node.js and the command line.

This book covers the fundamentals of HTML, SVG, CSS and JavaScript for visualising data.

If you're wanting to learn D3.js (or other JavaScript visualisation libraries) and need to get up to speed with HTML, SVG, CSS and JavaScript, this book is ideal. It goes through the basics of these languages, and gives a good foundation for learning libraries such as D3.js.

It's also useful if you're coming from a language such as Python or R and use tools such as Dash and Shiny. If you're wanting to customise your web applications and CSS and JavaScript are a stumbling block then this book should help.

This book doesn’t assume prior knowledge of HTML, SVG, CSS and JavaScript but it’ll be helpful if you’ve some coding experience. Being familiar with a text editor (or IDE) will also be helpful.

It’s by no means a comprehensive tutorial on HTML, SVG, CSS and JavaScript. You’d need a much bigger book for that. Think of this book as presenting the minimum of what you ought to know if you’re wanting to work with web based data visualisations.

This book is an ideal foundation for D3 Start to Finish.