Data Visualization Toolkit: Using JavaScript, Rails, and Postgres to Present Data and Geospatial Information

by Barrett Clark

Create Beautiful Visualizations that Free Your Data to Tell Powerful Truths “The depth of Barrett Clark’s knowledge shines through in his clear, concise, and confident. Barrett has been practicing all of this stuff in his day job for many years–Postgres, D3, GIS, all of it. The knowledge in this book is real-world and hard-earned!” –From the Foreword by Obie Fernandez
Data Visualization Toolkit is your hands-on, practical, and holistic guide to the art of visualizing data. You’ll learn how to use Rails, jQuery, D3, Leaflet, PostgreSQL, and PostGIS together, creating beautiful visualizations and maps that give your data a voice and to make it “dance.”   Barrett Clark teaches through real-world problems and examples developed specifically to illuminate every technique you need to generate stunningly effective visualizations. You’ll move from the absolute basics toward deep dives, mastering diverse visualizations and discovering when to use each. Along the way, you’ll build three start-to-finish visualization applications, using actual real estate, weather, and travel datasets.   Clark addresses every component of data your data, database, application server, visualization libraries, and more. He explains data transformations; presents expert techniques in JavaScript, Ruby, and SQL; and illuminates key concepts associated with both descriptive statistics and geospatial data. Throughout, everything is aimed at one to help you cut through the clutter and let your data tell all it can.   This guide will help you

641 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 4, 2016

Reviews

[Tim Tilberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was surprising to see Rails recommended as a data-visualization platform in 2016 -- but the speed with which you can `rails new` and create migrations makes it surprisingly practical. The author explores datasets by creating simple Rails apps with relevant migrations and import tasks. Create a single controller action, and drop a charting library into your view, and boom: You've got eyes on your data.

The author advocates for Rails because it creates a simple way to import a dataset into a database, perform complex calculations on it, and view it in a robust charting library.

The author presents several practical skills throughout the book:
- Extensive use of d3.js (Data-Driven Documents), providing both a high-level overview and a handful of modifiable recipes.
- Import your data with simple Rake tasks
- Bulk load your data (something ActiveRecord has been notoriously bad at)
- Load your data from external sources like S3
- Leverage the best parts of SQL or Ruby to conform your data

The author's main point is that `rails new` and `rails g scaffold` is so fast and easy, that while it seems like overkill to build a web app for data viz-- why not? Understanding how to leverage d3.js gives you unlimited power to describe your data, and Ruby gives you very fast tools to bootstrap it.

[Albert · Rating 1 out of 5]

The author spends a whole lot of time harassing women on the internet and pushing his radical political ideology on others.