Just to get us underway, let's take another look at an example we used in this book's Chapter 3, Context - Understanding Your Data Using R.

In that scenario, we had used some simple R scripting to summarize patient survey information into a result or summarized a file showing a total for the number of visits for each state in the United States. Now, using that same data file, perhaps we can get a general idea of what D3 may be able to do for us in the form of valuable data visualization.

We'll get into the details in the next section, but for now, all we need to do to get started is to create an HTML page based upon a bubble chart template downloaded from the D3 website (this particular template utilizes the D3 flare class libraries to create a bubble chart from our data file).

A bubble chart is an interesting way to display data in an efficient, reasonable way since, in this example, we want to show all 50 states from our data, it can be represented in a clear fashion.

The...