
Ask HN: What is the best way to get started with D3? - djcooley
I am looking to get started with d3 (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;d3js.org&#x2F;). What is the best way to do this?
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et-al
I would start with an fairly recent tutorial written by Bostock himself:
[https://observablehq.com/@d3/learn-d3](https://observablehq.com/@d3/learn-d3)

A point I personally needed to grasp back when I first worked with D3 was that
the data drives the visuals (hence _data-driven_ documents). It was not an
animation library. It's also not a charting library, but some charting
libraries are built on top of D3.

Lastly, the D3 wiki also contains links to other tutorials, but they're most
likely running on v3:

[https://github.com/d3/d3/wiki/Tutorials](https://github.com/d3/d3/wiki/Tutorials)

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djcooley
Thanks, I will start there!

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denvercoder904
I have recently taken up a project to build out a dashboard for realtime data
analytics. I did some exploratory research of the available data analytics
frameworks mainly in Python. I found Plotly to be very popular. How much extra
work would it be to just use D3 on the frontend with a standard python web
server on the backend versus using just the Plotly library?

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k__
I liked this book:

[https://www.newline.co/fullstack-d3](https://www.newline.co/fullstack-d3)

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djcooley
Thank you, I purchased the book!

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runawaybottle
There’s an Orielly book too.

