My Coding Philosophy
I am a firm believer in coding with a purpose. When you are first starting off learning JavaScript, you may want to learn everything there is to learn about the language (broad). I suggest that you instead only pick up the pieces of code you need in order to complete some bigger project (narrow).
To give you a glimpse of what you could do in d3, check out Mike Bostock's github repo, Christopher Viau's well-curated repository, or one of the many examples provided at bl.ocks.org/. The last link is by far your best resource as a beginner because the data visualizations are shown with their respective source code. Below, I embedded some of examples that showcase the capabilities of d3.js.
Via mbostock's gist.
Via rkirsling's gist.
Via mbostock's gist.
Via mtaptich's gist.
I also want to share some more notable examples of using d3.js as a means to explain multi-dimensional data in an interactive manner:
- Victor Powell's visual explanation of the Pythagorean Theorem.
- Anything that Mike Bostock creates as examples or some of his interactive visualizations while working for the New York Times
- This crazy map showing wind speeds in Tokyo, Japan.
- Mike Barry and Brian Card's visualizations of subway ridership in Boston.
- Square's crazy fast filtering library applied to airplaine data.
- For the life of me, I can't find the original source, but creating networks using click and drag mouse events (I used this in one of my engineering classes as an example).
- Wealth and Health of Nations by Mike Bostock again but made famous by Tom Carden of Gapminder.
- This way of visualizing multivariate data by benjiec.
- Gridlock vs. bottlenecks explained by Lewis Lehe.
- Jason Davies animated Bezier curves.
- All the basic charts that I use in my research from the d3.js example page.
With all this background, you should have the basic tools to start making data visualizations.