What this book covers

Chapter 1, Drawing Shapes in Canvas, introduces you to working with canvas. We will spend the majority of our time working with canvas when creating our charts. In this chapter, we will focus on getting to know how canvas works and how to create custom shapes with the two-dimensional canvas API.

Chapter 2, Advanced Drawing in Canvas, continues where we left off in Chapter 1 as we master our skills in canvas by adding to our tool belt various functions. We will be working with curves, images, text, and even pixel manipulation.

Chapter 3, Creating Cartesian-based Graphs, presents our first cluster of charts under the microscope, Cartesian-based graphs. Altogether this graph style is relatively simple; it opens the door to amazingly creative ways of exploring data. In this chapter, we will lay down the foundations to building charts, and with them, will continue and expand our overall canvas knowledge.

Chapter 4, Let's Curve Things Up, leverages the capability of creating non-linear charts to represent multidimensional data. In this chapter we will create Bubble, Pie, Doughnut, Radar, and Tree charts.

Chapter 5, Getting Out of the Box, progresses into more out-of-the-box, less commonly used charts and revisits some of our old charts to incorporate into them dynamic data or change their layout. In this chapter, we will create a funnel chart, add interactivity to our charts, create a recursive tree chart, add user interaction, and finish up with creating an interactive click meter.

Chapter 6, Bringing Static Things to Life, introduces JavaScript object-oriented programming, creating from scratch an animation library, adding multiple layers of canvas, and finishing up with creating a legend that is aware of its surrounding. This chapter will break us into a few new habits by first making everything dynamic followed by creating a more object-oriented program so it's easier for us to differentiate between tasks and reduce our code footprint.

Chapter 7, Depending on the Open Source Sphere, introduces you to the various libraries. The open source data visualization community is extremely rich and detailed with so many options and some really amazing libraries. Each library has its strong points and its disadvantages. Some are standalone code, while others depend on other platforms. Our goal in this chapter is both to showcase what we think are the best, most creative options online, and with it, to also learn the new skill of customizing third-party tools and expanding their features beyond their available documentation.

Chapter 8, Playing with Google Charts, explores the Google visualization API, task by task. We will look at the steps involved to create a chart and integrate it with the charting API. In the process, we will create new graphs and explore the core capabilities of this library.

Chapter 9, Using Google Maps, explores some of the features available on Google Maps to get us ready to work with mapping in general. Mapping on its own isn't data visualization, but after we establish our base understanding of how to work with maps, we will have a very stable background that will enable us to create many cutting-edge, cool projects integrating data and data visualization.

Chapter 10, Maps in Action, ties in more deeply to our topic of data visualization and mapping. One of the most popular ways to visualize data these days is by using maps. In this chapter, we will explore a few ideas on how to integrate data into maps using the Google Maps platform.

Appendix, Picking Your Graphics Technology, will explore other alternative options not covered in this book. The goal of this appendix is to set the environment up and enable you to have a better understanding of other graphing options. The appendix is not present in the book but is available as a free download at the following link:

http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/3707OT_Appendix_Final.pdf