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Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide To Design, Visualization, And Statistics (2011)

by Nathan Yau(Favorite Author)

3.76 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0470944889 (ISBN13: 9780470944882)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

John Wiley & Sons

review 1: Recently started reading this. It's a good book though a little bit dated at this point.My main issue is that it's pretty much a workbook - you're meant to use apps and write programs as you read the book and information about how to better display different types of information is sprinkled through that. I would've liked that information to be more separate from the actual "exercises". This made it hard to read on the train.
review 2: Yau is best when he talks about data and how to acquire it and about how to present various types of data. He is fixated on the notion that people need to code their own visualizations, preferably using R, an open source program that is quite good but not for the faint of heart. The documentation is spotty, and while I gamely c... morearried out multiple exercises from the book, there were errors in the coding one was instructed to use, and multiple gaps that assumed readers would have greater knowledge than they might. Small pullout boxes indicating where to go online to get additional information were not always helpful. I was reminded of a book I reviewed for the New York Times at the outset of the internet, just before graphical user interfaces burst on the scene. It was a well done book, too, but made obsolete almost as soon as the review was published. I suspect the same is happening now with visualizations, as new "black box" sites come online every month allowing users to create visualizations from existing datasets, without have to get down and get messy with code. Not that there's anything wrong with code, just that most people do not have time for it. less

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