Chapter 1. Getting Started with Highcharts

Highcharts is a JavaScript library that adds interactive charts to websites or web applications. It supports more than 20 chart types that can further be combined into different combinations to make data more meaningful. Highcharts comes with a plethora of features, and yet its API is simple enough to get beginners up and running.

In this chapter, we will present an overview of Highcharts and its various features. We will take a look at the advantages that Highcharts offers over its alternatives and how it can help us with visualizing data by providing deep browser support and extensibility. We will also learn how to install Highcharts and familiarize ourselves with the file structure and different modules. At the end of this chapter, we will construct a simple column chart to kick-start our coding journey and get hands-on experience with Highcharts configurations.