This month we are extremely excited to welcome (back) Mike Dewar, Data Scientist at bit.ly, to discuss getting started with data driven design in javascript.

Mike Bostock's d3 javascript library has lately taken the internet by storm, being the engine underlying a very beautiful set of visualisations (http://mbostock.github.com/d3/).  Because of this, many have investigated d3.js as a potential addition to their current visualisation stack, only to fall over one of some common hurdles. This talk will demonstrate how to clear these first few hurdles, including: 

• how to create and serve nice data objects
• how to use chrome's console to inspect and play with your visualisation, 
• how d3 interacts with the document object model, 
• how to draw arbitrary SVG objects,
• how to use d3.layout to relieve you of a few common graph-vis tasks. 

The talk will be useful to those who are curious about using d3.js and wants to get started making interactive and dynamic statistical visualisations. It will only scratch the surface though! For amazing examples of what the library is capable of see http://bit.ly/vW5Tng.

Schedule will proceed as usual: food and networking starting at 6:15pm, Mike will begin promptly at 7pm, and we will migrate to a local watering hole afterwards.