From the course: Data Analytics with Observable

What is Observable? - Observable Tutorial

From the course: Data Analytics with Observable

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What is Observable?

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- What is Observable? Observable is a computational notebook. What's that mean exactly? The notebook was invented by Steven Wolfram in the eighties. As he describes it. "The idea of a notebook is to have an interactive document that freely mixes code, results, graphics, text, and everything else." So, it's a place where you can perform the whole computation process, developing, documenting, and executing code, as well as communicating the results. as the documentation for the Jupyter Notebook describes it. But before you freak out, one of the coolest things about Observable is that it's usable even if you're not a coder. There are all kinds of click and drag features built into it that help you explore data with pretty much zero coding. And as you explore, you'll find simple little tweaks you can make to the notebook that'll alter how it behaves. And this will essentially be coding, but won't really feel like it. It's a great stepping stone to coding, in other words, while also being a full-featured coding environment for those who are comfortable with that. Okay, so Observable is in that notebook category, but what makes it special for us in the data visualization world? First of all, it was created by Mike Bostock, the creator of D3 JS, and Melody Meckfessel, former VP of engineering at Google. It's steeped in the heart and soul of open source, JavaScript-based interactive data visualization, and it's a notebook computing platform dedicated to the JavaScript language. If you're doing JavaScript-based visualization, especially D3, odds are that you've already come across Observable many dozens of times as you've been searching for examples or solutions to problems you're trying to solve. Some key features and advantages of Observable. There's a huge community of users. As Observable says, "The community's made up of hundreds of thousands of data practitioners. Together, they're creating and sharing their work with more than 5 million visitors and contributing to the largest collection of data visualization examples in the world." So, this is an immense resource for inspiration, learning, and even copying code for your own use. Visualizations are at the heart of the tool with very quick click and drag creation of a wide range of visuals and the ability to write code to extend those visuals quickly and easily. It's simple and blazingly fast to create interactive data exploration tools that any person can use. Data manipulation is also now a big part of the tool. You can even combine multiple data sources into one notebook. It's cloud and browser based, so you don't need to build or manage backend infrastructure or desktop software. You can share and collaborate on notebooks in real time with teammates within or even outside your organization. It includes a full version control system so you can fork notebooks, make changes, and merge back to a master build and see an even revert to unlimited older versions of any notebook. And it's a full JavaScript development platform. So, while it's built with data visualization in mind and has key libraries like D3 built in by default, you can include any of the many thousands of open source JavaScript libraries as needed. Observable is a really important part of the evolution of the data visualization tech stack. I find myself turning to it more and more, and I think you will too.

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