New Course: Data Analytics with Observable

As a long-time D3 user, I was really intrigued when a new platform appeared a few years ago called Observable . I didn't notice the announcement about it, it just started appearing in my web searches.

I'd Google something like "why is d3 map zoom not working?" (Yeah, I search for "why is _____ not working" a lot!) And I'd get a link to some Observable page.

It used to be that searches like this would always drive you to a page with a URL like https://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/4060606. That was the site Mike Bostock (the creator of D3) created to share example code. But all of a sudden, these Observable pages started showing up, soon even more often than the bl.ocks pages.

"What's this thing?" I and hundreds of thousands of other D3 programmers said. Well, it was this amazing new tool called Observable.

Observable, created by Mike Bostock and Melody Meckfessel , is a Javascript (and SQL) computing notebook. But ignore that "Javascript (and SQL)" part for a second. It is a collaborative browser-based tool enabling powerful data analytics, data visualization, and commentary all together.

Yes, you can code in there but, IMPORTANTLY, it's a place for non-programmers as well as programmers. It has very robust click and drag functionality built into it, allowing less technical people to do a lot of really interesting data work without any Javascript or SQL knowledge. And it also will help you learn a bit about data structures like JSON (Javascript Object Notation) and even some basic Javascript coding, as you learn to customize and extend those click and drag features. And if you know a lot of Javascript, you can GO TO TOWN on it because it's a full JS programming environment. And yes, as mentioned, you can also use SQL for querying your data.

When Observable first came out, it was not so user-friendly. It was a tool for programmers only. But it has since become a very important part of the toolkit for data workers and I think everyone should take a close look. That's why I created my newest course, Data Analytics with Observable.

And, by the way, I've already had both of Observable's founders on my Lesson & Listen series in the past, talking about tools in the data visualization space. Here are those two episodes, if you want to learn a bit more about them and Observable's background and history.

Tools of the Future w/ Melody Meckfessel

The Evolution of the Dataviz Tech Stack with Mike Bostock

Check out the new course and let me know what you think!

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