What is the difference between D3 and jQuery?

Question

Referring to this example:

http://vallandingham.me/stepper_steps.html

it seems that the D3 and jQuery libraries are very similar in the sense that they both do D

Answer 1

D3 is not just about visual graphs. Data Driven Documents. When you use d3, you bind data to dom nodes. Because of SVG we are able to make graphs, but D3 is so much more. You can replace frameworks like Backbone, Angular, and Ember with using D3.

Not sure who down voted, but let me add some more clarity.

Many websites request data from the server, which usually comes from a database. When the website receives this data, we have to do a page update of the new content. Many frameworks do this, and d3 does this as well. So instead of using a svg element, you can use html element instead. When you call the redraw, it'll quickly update the page with the new content. It's real nice to not have all the extra overhead like jquery, backbone + its plugins, angular, etc. You only need to know d3. Now d3 doesn't have a routing system baked into it. But you can always find one.

Jquery on the other hand, it's sole purpose is to write less code. It's just a short hand version of javascript that has been tested on many browsers. If you don't have a lot of jquery on your webpage. It's a great library to use. It's simple and takes a lotta pains out of javascript development for multiple browsers.

If you tried to implement jquery in a d3 like fashion, it'll be quite slow, as it wasn't designed for that task, likewise, d3 isn't design to post data to servers, it's designed just to consume and render data.