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Comment by runeks | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of relatively low level libraries for data visualization. Are there any very high level libraries, that allow regular coders like me to visualize some data quickly? I find myself needing this all the time, but I would prefer the simplest interface possible, rather than high configurability.

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If you're familiar with Python, try the Jupyter notebook (jupyter.org) - very useful for quick visualizations while also allowing you to quickly transform the data when necessary. The big advantage is your interactive 'repl' session is persisted as well as editable so you can resume anytime.

You can use any one of a number of visualization libraries such as matplotlib, bokeh, and more. Here's a quick start for an idea of the code needed: http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/bokeh/bokeh-notebooks/blo...

There's a bunch: https://github.com/wbkd/awesome-d3

Look into http://www.highcharts.com. Much more high level than D3, does nice charts and graphs. Free for non-commercial, and reasonably cheap for commercial work.

The other really useful tool is Tableau Public, if your data isn't confidential. GUI interface, but makes visualizing information really easy.

The other tool I use a lot is http://p5js.org. It's more a general-purpose drawing tool, but if all you want to do is put some boxes at (x,y) positions, it's a really good prototyping tool.

I like http://metricsgraphicsjs.org/examples.htm which is built on d3

My advice is to bite the bullet and learn d3 (instead of a wrapper like dc.js or nvd3) if this is for any production level data. Or build in the time you will need to rewrite it for API nastiness and probably performance reasons down the line.

I found C3 (http://c3js.org/) to be a reasonable layer on top of D3

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