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by Vaslo 1837 days ago
Used this in a data viz class and I’d say it’s overkill for most visualizations. Also very difficult to learn and frustrating to implement with all the “enter, exit” stuff. Excel, Tableau, etc so much easier and most of what you need to do visualizations in the corporate setting. Obviously it’s excellent for very specialized unusual visualizations but it’s rare those are really needed.
6 comments
mskullcap 1837 days ago
All the "enter, exit" stuff is what makes d3 beautiful. From a core handful of ideas, Mike is able to express a vast world of visualizations. I think it is the most amazing framework I have had the pleasure of using in my 30+yrs of software development. Ya, you could grab bar chart library and just give it data and get a graph out, or, you could spend a little time with d3 and actually learn something so powerful you can make bar charts - or virtually any other kind of visualization you will ever need. Well worth working past the frustration, imo.
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drewda 1837 days ago
If you want the polish of d3 and some of its power without all the complexity, try Vega Lite and related tooling: https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/
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HatchedLake721 1836 days ago
Apples and oranges.

D3 is a low level visualisation library where you write code.

Excel/Tableau are business tools.

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javierluraschi 1836 days ago
Why can't we have both? -- I had a similar frustration and got to work on https://hal9.ai, you get prebuilt blocks to easily import/transform/visualize data, while also being able modify the D3/Plot sources to your hearts contempt.
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th0ma5 1836 days ago
You actually don't have to use enter and exit and I agree it is cumbersome and unnecessary although I understand the desire for inband and out of band separation... https://medium.com/d3js-tutorials/d3-without-enter-91934575d...
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gaws 1835 days ago
> Excel, Tableau, etc so much easier and most of what you need to do visualizations in the corporate setting.

D3 is the best way to make visualizations online. Yes, it requires learning the library and building things from scratch, but it's light years better than the dog shit modules Tableau offers.

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NelsonMinar 1836 days ago
You're comparing Paint to Photoshop.
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