Social Data Visualization with HTML5 and JavaScript

The increasing adoption of HTML5 opens up a new world of JavaScript-powered visualizations. By harnessing the power of scalable vector graphics (SVGs), you can present even complex data to your users in an easy-to-understand format and improve the user experience by freeing users from the burden of tabular data.

Social Data Visualization with HTML5 and JavaScript teaches you how to leverage HTML5 techniques through JavaScript to build visualizations. It also helps to clear up how the often complicated OAuth protocol works to help you unlock a universe of social media data from sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

Social Data Visualization with HTML5 and JavaScript provides you with an introduction to creating an accessible view into the massive amounts of data available in social networks. Developers with some JavaScript experience and a desire to move past creating boring charts and tables will find this book a perfect fit. You will learn how to make use of powerful JavaScript libraries to become not just a programmer, but a data artist.

By using OAuth, which is helpfully demystified in one of the book’s chapters, you will be able to unlock the universe of social media data. Through visualizations, you will also tease out trends and relationships which would normally be lost in the noise.

What you will learn from this book

• Understand how the ever-growing world of data can be simplified through visualization
• See how traditional graphs fall down in the face of modern visualization
• Explore the various features of HTML5 which allow for creating visualizations
• Investigate how social networks delegate authority through OAuth
• Discover what data is available on Stack Overflow, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+
• Create exciting graphs which go beyond the normal standards
• Simplify your code with scales, layouts, and other features of the d3.js visualization library
• Set up Node.js as a platform to develop visualizations from social media

Approach
This book is a fast-paced guide full of step-by-step instructions that teach you how to visualize social data using HTML5 and JavaScript.

Who this book is for
This book is for developers who are excited about data and who want to share that excitement with others. Developers who are interested in the data which can be extracted from social networks will also find this book hugely beneficial.

Readers should have a working knowledge of both JavaScript and HTML.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Visualizing Data
Chapter 2: JavaScript and HTML5 for Visualizations
Chapter 3: OAuth
Chapter 4: JavaScript for Visualization
Chapter 5: Twitter
Chapter 6: Stack Overflow
Chapter 7: Facebook
Chapter 8: Google+