The Noteable plugin (disclaimer: I work there) allows you to create an entire computational notebook from a prompt. Load data, EDA, ML, viz, natural language description... all of it. It's the first thing I've done where when I've shared it with people not in tech they're legitimately wowed and a bit scared.
I'm biased of course but I think the fact that at the end you have an interactive document and not a static block of texts and figures makes it transformative.
I found that part really interesting since the requirement for a zero baseline today is limited to bar charts (see Few) whereas this insists you use it for line charts as well (which most modern data viz textbooks will say is okay because you judge the length of a bar chart but the position of a point in a time series).
This senseless insistence on beginning the vertical axis at zero is repeated in Huff's popular book, How to Lie with Statistics, where he also claims that failing to adopt this rule results in "misleading" graphs.
It depends on whether you want to show relative or absolute change. Huff's warning about scales not starting at zero occurs when the chart has a caption such as "A massive five percent growth!"
In my experience, not starting a scale at zero often DOES produce a misleading graph.
You must not know Tufte very well or not have looked very closely at this text. It includes numerous recommendations to use decorative elements in charts, and that kind of thing horrifies Tufte.
SVG performance on Firefox is abysmal. Even MSIE10/11 handles it much better. Start a petition to get Firefox to handle SVG as well as all the other browsers.
Well, I can guarantee it's not going to be like jQuery, since I'm really not all that familiar with it. The book does deal with the structure of D3 in detail, which you'll see in the chapters that are already up on the MEAP, and then it gets into specifics for creating charts, using layouts, custom events, maps and so on.
And you're right, for those of you thinking of writing one of these books, it is a hell of a time commitment and, on top of that, you have to know something pretty well to be able to make it, but you have to know something inside and out to be able to explain it.
