As we studied in the class, D3.js stands for Data-Driven Documents, which is widely used in creating the interactive visualizations on the web. The main author of the library, David Miller, gives a couple of reasons of why we should use D3.js:
1.Lots of examples.
Seriously, D3 has the tremendous number of example available online, despite those on the D3 library, thousands of previous D3 examples can be found online, from which you can use as your own source code.Almost every visualization charts you can think of, such as scatterplot, wind map, chord diagram, etc, has code you can use from.
2. Vibrant open-source community
D3 has been forked over 9,000 times on Github, which makes it one of the most popular projects on the website. Also, there are some third-party “wrapper” libraries such as NVD3 and Vega devoted themselves to speed up development time for creating common types of D3 visualizations.
3. Opportunity to learn web development skill.
One thing that makes D3 a better tool than Tableau is that the former has better interactivity thanks to a more scalable web framework. So when you learning D3, you can learn the skills about web development.
reference:http://d-miller.github.io/Why-Learn-D3/