Preface

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.

By the end of this book, you will have a strong working foundation in data visualization, graphing, data strategy, and HTML5 Canvas.