[sokoloff]

Came to say something similar. D3 starts out feeling like “magic” (in a bad way) until you wrap your head around the join/enter/update/exit model and how the various parts fit together.

Once you grasp it, it starts feeling like magic in the very good sense of that. I think it’s worth doing 3-5 representative “here’s what I want; how do I do it in D3?” exercises before concluding that D3 is too complex.

[siamese_puff]

Exactly. I spent like a week or two building bar charts and line charts in various ways to learn the basics, which helps. Some stuff I see, like on Mikes blog is seemingly magic