Having reached the halfway point with this book I have to say this is among the poorer tech tutorial/guides I've read.
Although the book claims otherwise this would be hard to follow without a fair prior understanding of javascript. If you are not at least passingly familiar with contemporary functional javascript large tracts of the text will be quite mystifying as the functional idioms used are never adequately explained. I would imagine for more novice programmers having to deal with the cognitive load of unpicking that code while also trying to learn the example d3 components would be very frustrating.
Speaking of frustrating if you attempt to follow the code examples as written in the book you'll quickly discover they often do not work as written. Lines, keywords and statements are omitted in the text and these omissions usually break the examples. Some of these are trivial to fix but many fixes were only possible by comparing the code I was writing out of the book with the code in git repo they offer. And worth noting the code in the git repo frequently diverges from that in the book (mostly trivially but sometimes inexplicably so and without explanation). I seems to me that no one can have sat down and worked through the example in the book once the text was finished. To my mind this is inexcusable in this kind of technical text.
In general I found the tone of the text assumes that you are always able to understand the examples, and maybe also the author might find it confusing that you don't immediately understand. This would be fine for a book pitched at an expert audience but not so useful for people with "some basic knowledge of javascript... [and] no prior experience with data visualization or D3" (to quote the intro). I suspect the authors would be better placed to write a text on best practices for functional d3.
I bought the kindle edition and the text was also very, very poorly formatted with lines of code out of place and other line formatting errors.
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Top reviews from other countries
- DanByReviewed in the United Kingdom on July 27, 2017
Poor for novices, ok for more expert programmers.
