Learning Highcharts

Whether you’re a novice or an advanced web developer, this practical tutorial will enable you to produce stunning interactive charts using Highcharts. With a foreword by the creator, it’s the only guide you’ll need to get started.

Overview

• Step-by-step instructions with real-live data to create bar charts, column charts and pie charts, to easily create artistic and professional quality charts
• Learn tips and tricks to create a variety of charts such as horizontal gauge charts, projection charts, and circular ratio charts
• Use and integrate Highcharts with jQuery Mobile and ExtJS 4, and understand how to run Highcharts on the server-side
• Add advanced reporting capabilities and understand how to select the right chart for your data

In Detail

Highcharts is a popular web charting software that produces stunning and smooth animated JavaScript and HTML5 SVG graphs. It is among the leading web charting software in the market and has been used in many different sectors — from financial to social websites. Although it is built on top of jQuery, it is so simple to construct that you need little programming skill to create a simple web chart. Highcharts works on all modern browsers and is solely based on native browser technologies and doesn't require client side plugins like Flash or Java.

"Learning Highcharts" is a comprehensive tutorial with clear and practical examples. This book follows a step by step approach towards making artistic, presentable, or professional style charts and other types of charts that you won't find elsewhere. It also shows you how to integrate Highcharts with other popular frameworks, such as jQuery, jQuery Mobile, and ExtJS and even how to run it on the server side.

The book starts off with an introduction to Highcharts and demonstrates usage of its rich set of options. This is followed by an introduction to each type of basic chart, beginning with simple illustrations and ending with more artistic and productive additions to the charts. The book then guides you how to use the Highcharts API and events handling which are important to build interactive applications. It then goes on to show you how to apply Highcharts onto a popular AJAX Framework or even jQuery, jQuery Mobile and Ext JS. Finally the book shows readers how to set up Highcharts running on server side.

"Learning Highcharts" aims to teach you everything you need to know about Highcharts, and take the advanced leap from Flash to JavaScript, with this extremely productive and effective Charting software available, thus helping you build basic charts and even multiple series and axes charts. The book also shows you the flexibility of Highcharts and how to create other special charts. The programming side of APIs and event handling will benefit the readers in building advanced web applications with Highcharts. The book also guides readers on how to integrate Highcharts with popular frameworks such as jQuery Mobile and Ext JS. By the end of the book, you should be able to use Highcharts to suit your web page or application needs.

What you will learn from this book

• Learning the basics—line, column, and pie charts and getting to grips with the latest features of Highcharts
• Producing artistic, professional and funky charts with examples
• Using the Highcharts APIs to produce interactive charts
• Creating horizontal gauge chart and projection charts
• Using Highcharts event handlers
• Using Highcharts with jQuery Mobile
• Using Highcharts with Ext JS 4
• Running Highcharts on the server side