Data Visualization with Python and JavaScript: Scrape, Clean, Explore & Transform Your Data

Learn how to turn raw data into rich, interactive web visualizations with the powerful combination of Python and JavaScript. With this hands-on guide, author Kyran Dale teaches you how build a basic dataviz toolchain with best-of-breed Python and JavaScript libraries—including Scrapy, Matplotlib, Pandas, Flask, and D3—for crafting engaging, browser-based visualizations.

As a working example, throughout the book Dale walks you through transforming Wikipedia’s table-based list of Nobel Prize winners into an interactive visualization. You’ll examine steps along the entire toolchain, from scraping, cleaning, exploring, and delivering data to building the visualization with JavaScript’s D3 library. If you’re ready to create your own web-based data visualizations—and know either Python or JavaScript— this is the book for you.

• Learn how to manipulate data with Python
• Understand the commonalities between Python and JavaScript
• Extract information from websites by using Python’s web-scraping tools, BeautifulSoup and Scrapy
• Clean and explore data with Python’s Pandas, Matplotlib, and Numpy libraries
• Serve data and create RESTful web APIs with Python’s Flask framework
• Create engaging, interactive web visualizations with JavaScript’s D3 library

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Development Setup
Chapter 2 A Language-Learning Bridge Between Python and JavaScript
Chapter 3 Reading and Writing Data with Python
Chapter 4 Webdev 101
Chapter 5 Getting Data off the Web with Python
Chapter 6 Development Setup
Chapter 7 A Language-Learning Bridge Between Python and JavaScript
Chapter 8 Reading and Writing Data with Python
Chapter 9 Webdev 101
Chapter 10 Getting Data off the Web with Python
Chapter 11 Heavyweight Scraping with Scrapy
Chapter 12 Introduction to NumPy
Chapter 13 Introduction to Pandas
Chapter 14 Cleaning Data with Pandas
Chapter 15 Visualizing Data with Matplotlib
Chapter 16 Exploring Data with Pandas
Chapter 17 Delivering the Data
Chapter 18 RESTful Data with Flask
Chapter 19 Imagining a Nobel Visualization
Chapter 20 Building a Visualization
Chapter 21 Introducing D3—The Story of a Bar Chart
Chapter 22 Visualizing Individual Prizes
Chapter 23 Mapping with D3
Chapter 24 Visualizing Individual Winners
Chapter 25 The Menu Bar
Chapter 26 Conclusion