What this book covers

Chapter 1, Web Charts, describes how web charts have been done since the birth of HTML to the latest HTML 5 standard with SVG and canvas technologies. This chapter also gives a short survey of charting software on the market using the HTML 5 standard and discusses why Highcharts is a better product.

Chapter 2, Highcharts Configurations, covers the common configuration options in chart components with plenty of examples and explains how the chart layout works.

Chapter 3, Line, Area, and Scatter Charts, demonstrates from plotting a simple line, area, and scatter charts to a poster-like chart including all three series types.

Chapter 4, Bar and Column Charts, demonstrates bar and column charts as well as various derived charts such as stacked chart, percentage chart, mirror chart, group chart, overlap chart, mirror stacked chart, and horizontal gauge chart.

Chapter 5, Pie Charts, demonstrates how to build various charts, from a simple pie chart to a multiseries chart, such as multiple pies in a chart and a concentric rings pie chart, that is, a donut chart.

Chapter 6, Gauge, Polar, and Range Charts, gives a step-by-step guide on constructing a twin dial speedometer and demonstrates polar chart characteristics and its similarity to a cartesian chart. It also illustrates the use of range data on area and column range charts.

Chapter 7, Highcharts APIs, explains the usage of Highcharts APIs and illustrates this by using a stock market demo to draw dynamic charts. The chapter discusses the use of different methods to update the series and analyses the performance of each method on various browsers, as well as the scalability of Highcharts.

Chapter 8, Highcharts Events, explains Highcharts events and demonstrates them through various user interactions with the charts from the portfolio application demos.

Chapter 9, Highcharts and jQuery Mobile, gives a short tutorial on the jQuery Mobile framework and demonstrates how to integrate it with Highcharts by creating a mobile web application browsing an Olympic medals table. The chapter also covers the use of touch-based and rotate events with Highcharts.

Chapter 10, Highcharts and Ext JS, gives a short introduction on Sencha's Ext JS and describes the components likely to be used in an application with Highcharts. It also shows how to use a module, Highcharts extension, in order to plot Highcharts graphs within an Ext JS application.

Chapter 11, Running Highcharts on the Server Side, describes different approaches for running Highcharts on the server side for automating chart generation and exporting the charts into SVG or image files.