You might already be used to manipulating DOM and CSS with libraries such as jQuery; if so, much of this will seem very familiar, as D3 has a full suite of manipulation tools. If not, don't worry, as this chapter exists to get everyone up to speed.

Very similar to HTML's DOM is the SVG namespace, which we'll use for most of the examples in this book. SVG is at the core of building truly great visualizations, so we'll take special care to understand it, starting out by manually drawing shapes and then doing the same using D3's path generators in Chapter 3, Shape Primitives of D3.

In this chapter, we'll take a look at the core technologies that make D3 tick. They are as follows:

• Document Object Model (DOM)
• Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)