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A different introduction to D3 was published a few weeks ago by Arvind Satyanarayan of MIT, if you want another perspective. Here’s the link and discussion on t

A different introduction to D3 was published a few weeks ago by Arvind Satyanarayan of MIT, if you want another perspective. Here’s the link and discussion on that. https://observablehq.com/@mitvis/introduction-to-d3 https://observablehq.com/@mitvis/introduction-to-d3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22476930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22476930

CobsterLock 7y ago
Thanks for posting. do you have any opinion on NVD3 or other frameworks on top of d3? I always liked the fine grain control plain d3, but thought the idea of out of the box interactive charts to be pretty cool
- mbostock 7y ago
  If you use a chart typology (a tool that implements a fixed set of chart types), you tend to hit a wall with configuration. So I prefer to either fork an existing D3 example, where I can edit the code to my liking, or use a principled visualization grammar such as Vega-Lite.
appleiigs 7y ago
In my opinion, the Observable introductions and learn-by-example posts[1] are the best way to learn D3. They are very well written and easy to follow. I have a couple books on D3 and: 1) they are all out-of-date because of the changes in V4 to V5, 2) the authors write/use D3 in weird ways. I look at Observable's code examples as the canonical way of using the library. Please keep up the good work! One suggestion is to have some sort of curriculum or categorization of the posts from easy to hard. For example, I had to skim through 120 posts to find the easy examples (bar chart, line chart, pie chart) then moved on to the more difficult. [1] https://observablehq.com/explore https://observablehq.com/explore EDIT: Oh, i just found this: https://observablehq.com/collection/@d3/learn-d3 https://observablehq.com/collection/@d3/learn-d3
- mbostock 7y ago
  Rating the difficulty of the examples is a great idea, thanks! The gallery currently leads with harder ones because they tend to be more interesting (animation and interaction), but you can find easier ones farther down. https://observablehq.com/@d3/gallery https://observablehq.com/@d3/gallery

CobsterLock 7y ago

Thanks for posting. do you have any opinion on NVD3 or other frameworks on top of d3? I always liked the fine grain control plain d3, but thought the idea of out of the box interactive charts to be pretty cool

mbostock 7y ago
If you use a chart typology (a tool that implements a fixed set of chart types), you tend to hit a wall with configuration. So I prefer to either fork an existing D3 example, where I can edit the code to my liking, or use a principled visualization grammar such as Vega-Lite.

appleiigs 7y ago

In my opinion, the Observable introductions and learn-by-example posts[1] are the best way to learn D3. They are very well written and easy to follow. I have a couple books on D3 and: 1) they are all out-of-date because of the changes in V4 to V5, 2) the authors write/use D3 in weird ways. I look at Observable's code examples as the canonical way of using the library. Please keep up the good work! One suggestion is to have some sort of curriculum or categorization of the posts from easy to hard. For example, I had to skim through 120 posts to find the easy examples (bar chart, line chart, pie chart) then moved on to the more difficult. [1] https://observablehq.com/explore https://observablehq.com/explore EDIT: Oh, i just found this: https://observablehq.com/collection/@d3/learn-d3 https://observablehq.com/collection/@d3/learn-d3

mbostock 7y ago
Rating the difficulty of the examples is a great idea, thanks! The gallery currently leads with harder ones because they tend to be more interesting (animation and interaction), but you can find easier ones farther down. https://observablehq.com/@d3/gallery https://observablehq.com/@d3/gallery