From the course: DC.js for Data Science Essential Training

What is DC? - JavaScript Tutorial

From the course: DC.js for Data Science Essential Training

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What is DC?

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- [Instructor] DC stands for Dimensional Charting and it's a JavaScript library used to visualize your data as web graphics. DC is particularly good at creating dashboards where the dataset can be filtered graphically and all the constituent parts update automatically. DC harnesses the power of parent libraries Crossfilter and D3. The Crossfilter side of the family allows DC to slice and dice large datasets very efficiently. By contrast, the D3 genes allow DC to create web graphics which are easy to style using CSS. Creating a graphic in DC is fast. Creating a bar chart under some approaches would mean declaring rectangles for the bars, lines for the axes, and labels for the axis ticks. Creating a bar chart in DC means calling a bar chart class and then setting some parameters such as width and height. People who have never coded before often find DC straightforward. Lots of behaviors which would be complex to coding JavaScript are done automatically in DC. You actually have to switch them off if you don't want them. For example, when you create a line chart, you can automatically click and drag on it to filter for time period. When you filter on one chart, all the other charts update automatically. You don't need to specify these behaviors at all. In practical terms, DC is a JavaScript file, about 300 kilobytes in size. You create a webpage and link it to three files, DC, D3 and Crossfilter. And once you've done that, you can use a new set of commands that wouldn't be available to you if you were just using JavaScript. You will be using D3, Crossfilter and DC commands in this course. DC doesn't re-label D3 and Crossfilter code, it just adds a few commands on top that tie the approaches together. So to understand DC properly, it's important to distinguish commands from the three libraries, and I'll be pointing them out along the way.

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