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Today, the Web and the world are increasingly being defined by data. With the data revolution
of the Internet in the early nineties and until today, more and more data has been exposed
and aggregated, from government agencies, public sector information, financial information,
digital media and news, and social media to private sector information, user information, and
so on. With the overload of data on the Web it's easy to overlook information, as it's much
harder to read and analyze in data format. That's where we come in. Our goal in this book is
to open up the door to you to data visualization. With step-by-step guides that will take you
from the basic creation of visual charts all the way through to complex geographical location
information driven by Google Maps and Google Docs (Drive).
HTML5 and JavaScript are leading the new paths for data visualization and are moving us
away from traditional client-side graph creation in Adobe Flash or server-side generated
images. With the maturing of browsers, they are becoming more capable and solid
than ever before. This is a perfect time to start transitioning the creation of graphs to
HTML/JavaScript. But where do you start, and what is the best way to create the specific
graph/map your project needs?
With that said, our goal in this book is to run through, showcase, and teach all the critical
skills needed in the HTML5/JavaScript age of data visualization. Our goal is to help you make
the right choice when you need to build a custom graphic or graph/chart and to help you
choose the right way between creating it on your own or using third-party, small/large tools to
create the graphic your task needs.
Although this is a cookbook, I've painstakingly organized it topic by topic in a very linear
way, making it a great read from start to end. As such, I personally recommend that you sit
back and actually read it from start to finish, and if you do so, you will learn in the process
everything you ever needed to know about the two-dimensional Canvas API, how to create
shapes, interaction, and various graphs/charts, and how to create them from scratch in
HTML5 Canvas. You will learn how to work with and modify third-party tools, working with the
Google Visualization API, Google Maps, and Google Docs. Woven throughout the book are
various data formats from basic strings, external files, XML, and Google Docs to Twitter search
results. As such, you will get an extra practice in loading, modifying, and working with data
in JavaScript. |
