As we move more to the web for showing data, there is a need for good plotting libraries. We started using flot and eventually migrated to JQPlot which I’ve been fairly happy with for general plotting. Lately, I’ve been hearing about D3 for more custom plots and thought I’d take a bit of time to learn more about it this weekend.
I just had a quick read of Getting Started with D3 by Mike Dewar. I saw an excellent talk by the author (who works at bit.ly) related to data analysis. Sadly, I wasn’t terribly happy with the book. Part of it is that the book is just incredibly short! The idea of taking MTA data to look at was good, but somehow I think more examples could have been shown, or perhaps some more involved visualizations/interactions. After reading the book, I have a basic feeling for some of what D3 can do, but am not sure if I could have learned the same information from simply looking through the web…Some introduction to SVG would have been rather helpful.
I may play with it a bit later for a few custom visualizations and see whether it is worthwhile…From the book, and the examples that I’ve seen, it is useful when you’re wanting to do non-standard plots, otherwise, I think I’ll stick with jqplot.
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