For a person that probably couldn’t spell javascript 4 months ago to now having ~some~ js, d3, and Observable experience from these last 4 months–I finally got something nice to show. Thank you to Mike and team. D3/js/ObServable can be extremely confusing to me (come from an R background), but it’s been fun. Way more power than ggplot2
Awesome work, really nice visualization! I teach a course where most students are familiar with R, I’d be curious if you have any particular tips for someone with an R-background learning to use Observable?
That is a good question. I am probably a bad example as I don’t necessarily have a computer science mind, so I’m a slow learner. I’ve always found R (like any scripting language) to be a WYSIWYG. It’s easy to declare a variable equals something and do stuff with that variable (x = read.csv(…)). JS has that too I guess, but it feels way clunky to me. Observable was/is frustrating because I started learning D3 ‘offline’ on a live-server, then when I decided to commit to using Observable, it felt like I had to start over. So, just takes times. My tip would be to populate and promote Observable so they it eventually dominates google results instead of the dearth of d3v3 blocks.org that currently are there.
Going into object-oriented stuff is still weird to me (data.map(d => d.something). I struggled with understanding the anonymity of of JS (and still do). That said, check out http://kbroman.org/Tools4RR/. He has a ton of old mostly V3 d3 examples and is a prominent R teacher and is very good and pragmatic