I recently read “Getting Started with D3” by Mike Dewar and wanted to share my initial impressions of the D3 visualization library.

Positive Aspects

  • The book’s concept of using MTA (Metropolitan Transportation Authority) data was promising
  • I appreciated Dewar’s background, having seen an excellent talk by him from his work at bit.ly

Criticisms

I found the book disappointingly brief. More examples could have been shown, or perhaps some more involved visualizations/interactions. An SVG introduction would have been helpful, and I wasn’t confident I couldn’t have learned the same material from web resources alone.

Conclusion

D3 is worthwhile specifically when you’re wanting to do non-standard plots. For standard plotting tasks, I prefer sticking with jqplot, having previously used flot for general data visualization needs.