Prefacio

Back in 2017, I was working as a frontend developer and found myself yearning for my next professional step. Although I enjoyed developing websites, something was missing. I was looking to bridge my background in engineering and my love for teaching with my new coding skills. That’s when my partner suggested I have a look at data visualization. For some reason, he thought I’d enjoy exploring this booming field. When I googled “data visualization,” I stumbled upon the project Data Sketches (www.datasketch.es) by Nadieh Bremer and Shirley Wu. Like so many others, I was deeply inspired and knew I had to learn how to build such projects. That’s when I discovered a library called D3.js that they used to create their work.

I started to learn D3 here and there, subscribing to courses and reading blog posts. But my frustration kept growing as I discovered that many of the code snippets I was learning were outdated. I was confused by the lack of a straightforward step-by-step approach to learning and building D3 projects. When the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the world went into shutdown, I finally had time to sit down and start building my first projects. Slowly, the philosophy behind D3 began to make sense and became more and more intuitive.

A while later, thanks to a kind nudge from Andy Kirk, I was contacted by Nicole Butterfield at Manning. She told me they were looking to build a course about D3 and asked if I’d be interested. With all the enthusiasm from my first dataviz projects, I jumped headfirst into that challenge and started to put together a strategy for learning D3. After a few months, Interactive Visualization with D3.js (http://mng.bz/jXrz) came to life.

While building this course with the second edition of D3.js in Action as a reference, my early frustrations came back. Much had changed with D3 since the book’s release, keeping us from using it to its full potential. In all my naiveté, I suggested to Nicole that I’d be willing to update the book and was lucky that Elijah and Manning allowed me to add my touch to this manuscript and bring my vision to life.

With this new edition, I wish to provide you, the reader, with a road map toward creating unique and insightful data visualizations. This book and the projects it contains will help you learn the basics and the more advanced concepts, and I hope it will serve you as a reference for years to come.