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About the Book
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.
The book covers topics such as:
- HTML elements such as headings, lists, images and dropdown menus
- SVG elements such as lines, rectangles, circles, groups and paths
- SVG transforms (including how to combine them)
- CSS rules
- CSS properties for HTML and SVG
- CSS id and class attributes
- CSS layout (including Flexbox)
- CSS media queries
- JavaScript variables and data types
- JavaScript arrays and objects
- JavaScript functions
- JavaScript iteration
- JavaScript promises
- JavaScript in the browser (Document Object Model or DOM)
- JavaScript data requests
- Node.js
- ES Modules
- Creating a web application using Vite
This book is an ideal foundation for D3 Start to Finish.
About the Author
Peter Cook has built data visualisations for Carbon Tracker, London Datastore and McGraw Hill Education. He currently works as a senior visualisation developer at Flourish and also writes about the how-to of data visualisation for Create With Data.
He's run training courses for clients such as the BBC and The Economist and written data visualisation tutorials for Flowing Data and Creative Bloq. He created D3 in Depth and Create With Data.
He's the author of four books: Visualising Data with JavaScript, Data Dashboards with JavaScript, D3 Start to Finish and Fundamentals of HTML, CSS, SVG & JavaScript for Data Visualisation.