D3.js is an extraordinary piece of software, but more importantly it has been a gateway to data visualisation that has enabled users to be able to turn information into storytelling.
The journey for d3 began over 10 years ago and in that time the central tenants of using pre-built functions to bind arbitrary data to a Document Object Model (DOM), and then apply data-driven transformations to the document have been well established.
However, I can testify as someone that does not have a formal coding background that the barrier to entry can be daunting for some. That's why I started down the journey of writing down the things that I was learning as I started to understand d3 and why ultimately that ended up becoming the book D3 Tips and Tricks (of which there have now been 4 editions!).
That first edition was not just a journey in learning how to wrangle d3, it was also a learning experience in how to gather information into a book form and to make it available to others. My default start point was to make the information available for free to whomever wanted to read it and as it turns out, this wasn't so easy. However, cometh the hour, cometh the platform.
Leanpub provided an excellent ecosystem for supporting the development, publishing and front-end for making the book available to others and in the process I found that I enjoyed the act of writing. I won't claim to have a particularly 'cultured' delivery style. I am frequently irreverent and prefer describing what I am learning in a fashion that makes sense to someone who might be somewhat naive about the background technical niceties.
I'll be honest and say that I was definitely encouraged by the feedback and uptake of the book. People kindly offered advice and suggestions for improvements. Even going so far as to do proof reading and cover design work!
The end result (although this is by no means the end!) is that people have downloaded my books over 92,000 times. That is staggering and quite frankly, a pretty daunting prospect to consider that so many people might be taking my advice on something, let alone a JavaScript library that I wanted to learn about because it looked like fun :-).
Doing this has been extremely time consuming and while I don’t begrudge the effort that it entails, it isn’t my day job and I have to be careful about where I place my focus so that I can try and balance the enjoyment that I get out of writing and making sure that the end users are getting the information they need.
So the prospect of putting the quite considerable content that I have amassed over the years into a form of online learning programme has not been something that I have seriously considered because of the amount of time that it would have entailed.
But again... Cometh the hour, cometh the platform. In this case it came in the form of the team from Educative. The contacted me out of the blue to ask if I was interested in partnering with them to make the contents of the book available as an online course. I explained that I wasn’t going to be able to dedicate a considerable amount of time to support them, but they had a scheme for such partnerships that allowed me to make some alterations to the book (in particular to improve the resolution of the images) and for them to be able to deliver the content in an appropriate way.
The end result has been the publishing of D3 Tips and Tricks: Interactive Data Visualization as an online course.
It includes 144 lessons, nine separate quizzes, 18 challenge problems, 295 illustrations and over 60 code samples! The estimation for completion time is 102 hours. That's a lot of learning.
The first time that the Educative team provided me with an overview of the content I was staggered by the presentation and volume of information. It really is a great collection and I’m very glad that they have been able to make it available to a wider audience.
Will this be something that will be a different direction for me and perhaps for some of my other books? Really good question. That will definitely depend on what sort of reaction to the course there is. I am intending to be as active as possible on the Educative forum to provide assistance to students. Perhaps this will be another rewarding outlet that I will want to pursue.
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