How to build a Facebook dashboard
Course overview
This course is devoted to the basics of data visualization including geo-visualization using D3.js JavaScript library. We are going to build a simple dashboard containing bar chart and map data distribution collected from Facebook pages with the help of Facebook API and Python tools for interaction with them. All obtained data will need storage in MongoDB. Within this course, you will also learn a full stack of others popular and common used technologies like Flask, AngularJS, HTML5, CCS3, Bootstrap, etc. This course consists not only of practical usage of the mentioned tools, but we will also familiarize you with central concepts of data visualization and the principles of the work with using frameworks and libraries. We suppose that the student has the basic knowledge of Python and JavaScript on a level of understanding of functions.
What you'll learn
The course is conditionally divided into main parts. In the first one, you will work with Facebook API, fetch data from Facebook pages using Python and save it into the MongoDB database. We will show how to write queries to get content of Facebook pages and accounts, how to process requests with the help of Python and its specific libraries. We will also demonstrate the main possibilities of MongoDB and how and when it may be successfully used.
In the second part of the course, we meet you with the perfect visualization library D3.js, and one of the standardly used JavaScript frameworks for the development of single-page web applications AngularJS. You will build a dashboard with interactive bar and map charts using collected Facebook data. Among other things, we will learn main features of the D3.js library such as SVG objects and its attributes, scaling, mouse events, transitions, etc., consider the particularities of TopoJSON file format for collecting geodata.
The theoretical and practical materials concerning the AngularJS framework include directives, services, controllers, data binding, dependency injection pattern and supplemented with many illustrative examples. Thus, the content of this course is designed for you to learn main approaches and the most popular and effective tools of data visualization, so you will be able to process data correctly and easily build wonderful, alive and informative charts.
Syllabus
WEEK 1. Facebook REST API introduction
WEEK 2. Introduction to MongoDB & building REST application with Flask framework
WEEK 3. Introduction to D3.js and AngularJS
WEEK 4. Building d3.js visualization