bought this great book on  d3.js (Data-Driven documents), written by  Nick Qi Zhu

D3 can plot map in various projections, however do not expect to get same set of (overlapping) functionality as Leaflet or OpenLayers. D3 can extend these mapping frameworks. For OL3 simple  example is here for Leaflet, my favourite is  hexbins or check my own experiment here.

While D3 is kind of ‘base’ charting library (lot of utility functions, helpers) , there is upper , high level library too  that can provide lot of ‘boilerplate’ for common charts. Here comes great news:

Nick Qi Zhu   is also author of the open source javascript  lib dc.js   (Dimensional Charting) library  that is using crossfilter (Fast Multidimensional Filtering for Coordinated Views) . Part of the dc.js lib is set of most common charts and one of them is choropleth map .

Other resources:

D3 Animation : http://blog.visual.ly/creating-animations-and-transitions-with-d3-js/

Design selections: http://www.awwwards.com/fresh-ui-inspiration-in-the-era-of-google-material-and-design-patterns.html