Instant jQuery Flot Visual Data Analysis

Visualize and analyze your data with the jQuery Flot plotting library using real-world examples

Overview

• Learn something new in an Instant! A short, fast, focused guide delivering immediate results
• Apply statistical techniques to your data and display data using various chart types
• Get started with the jQuery Flot library and learn to apply it to real-world data visualization
• Detailed explanations of Flot’s capabilities and configurations

In Detail

Data visualization and analysis is a crucial skill in many software projects. Flot uses jQuery and HTML5 to add easy and powerful visualization capabilities to any web application. Flot produces beautiful visualizations with a minimal amount of code. It is also highly configurable, extensible, and includes many plugins out of the box.

A practical guide to take you through the basics of using Flot to visualize your data; the book describes Flot’s functionality in dedicated sections that include code, screenshots, and detailed explanations so that you can learn to produce charts in minutes. As you progress though this book, it will guide you through real-world examples to show you how to use statistical techniques with Flot for interactive data visualization and analysis.

Starting with the very basics, you will learn exactly what you need to do to display the simplest chart using Flot. This step-by-step guide takes you through Flot’s many features and settings until you can finally master the techniques you’ll need to apply Flot to your application’s data.

You'll learn to create basic point, line, and bar charts and to use Flot’s stack, pie, and time plugins to create specialized chart types. Along with learning to display complex data with multiple customizable axes you will learn to make your charts interactive with Flot’s crosshair plugin. Finally, this book will guide you through learning statistical techniques via the jStat JavaScript library to analyse data; along with Flot’s errorbars and fillbetween plugins to display error margins and data percentiles.

Instant jQuery Flot Visual Data Analysis will give you a head start so that you can add data visualization features to your applications with ease.

What you will learn from this book

• Create stack, pie, and time-based charts to display specialized data sets
• Customize a chart’s axes so that you can display complex combinations and types of data
• Add interactivity to your charts so that users can inspect the data with ease
• Use common statistical techniques such as error bars and percentiles to analyze your data
• Use the jStat library to further analyze your data
• Expand your skills by creating plugins that allow you to reuse your custom solutions easily

Approach

Filled with practical, step-by-step instructions and clear explanations for the most important and useful tasks. A quick, instruction-based guide full of examples that details on the various aspects of Flot and how users can apply it to data groups for interactive data representation techniques.

Who this book is written for

If you are a data visualization developer, mapping and presentation software developer, or anyone with an interest in jQuery visualization, this book is ideal for you. If you have a working knowledge of jQuery and JavaScript, you can use this book to add sophisticated visualizations to your web application so that your users can easily understand data that is crucial to them.

Brian Peiris

Brian Peiris is a developer with a passion for the Web and all things technological. He's been programming for more than 15 years and has been a professional web developer for 7 years. Brian has followed jQuery since its inception and has used Flot extensively in commercial projects. When he's not coding, Brian enjoys tinkering with electronics, robotics, and playing the guitar and violin.