I really like the power of D3 but I have tried and failed at learning D3.js properly, I was unable to understand basic bars and graphs but the same reason you mentioned I find it difficult to advance, SVG manipulation with a big dataset is difficult after some point to create a complex visualizations.
Any good resources you could share that has helped you? Thank you.
Beyond that, copying and pasting working examples and trying to adjust them for your purposes works really well. I still don't fully understand the API but it doesn't seem to matter that much to start with - I'm still in the "monkey see, monkey do, monkey iterate" phase.
I have tried ObservableHQ but I am not sure it helps me understand D3 as much as it does help me use it like a Jupyter notebook.
And unlike Jupyter, ObservableHQ notebook does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to creating charts for the web which outside that makes it really difficult to adapt to.
I guess I will have to follow the monkey rule until I really understand it well and need to learn desperately.
Any good resources you could share that has helped you? Thank you.