Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics 1st Edition
http://www.amazon.com/Visualize-This-FlowingData-Visualization-Statistics/dp/0470944889
Book Description
Data doesn?t decrease; it is ever-increasing and can be overwhelming to organize in a way that makes sense to its intended audience. Wouldn?t it be wonderful if we could actually visualize data in such a way that we could maximize its potential and tell a story in a clear, concise manner? Thanks to the creative genius of Nathan Yau, we can. With this full-color book, data visualization guru and author Nathan Yau uses step-by-step tutorials to show you how to visualize and tell stories with data. He explains how to gather, parse, and format data and then design high quality graphics that help you explore and present patterns, outliers, and relationships.Visualize This demonstrates how to explain data visually so that you can present your information in a way that is easy to understand and appealing.
Customer Reviews
Diappointingly Vague and Circular
99 of 104 people found the following review helpful
I was really hoping for a book on how to abstract data sets into visualizations, with concrete programming examples. In other words, "ask yourself these questions about the data; with these answers (or those), the data is best visualized in these formats. Now, let's implement".Instead, I found it to be a kind of "circular" logic (visualize data in good ways is important... here is some data visualized in a good way... now doesn't that show how important it is - and it's cool... btw here is a code snippet). It is almost like the book is just trying to convince me that data visualization can be powerful and cool. I know that - that's why I bought this, I wanted to learn the tools and techniques to determine the best and most innovative way to visualize data sets, not how the author has visualized existing data sets he has dealt with.Interesting enough to borrow if you see it on a friend's desk, but I don't think I'd purchase it again if I had the opportunity.
Great start
56 of 59 people found the following review helpful
I really enjoyed this book. It is absolutely beautifully printed and the examples are well made and well explained. There are a couple of things I would have liked to see done a little differently.First, every example uses Adobe Illustrator to make the visualization look as good as they do. In order to complete the exercises, you must have Illustrator. Nathan does explain that it can be obtained at a discount or you can an older version, but it's still a pretty big financial investment. If I hadn't been able to dig up a old copy, Illustrator 9, I would have been out of luck. Even with my outdated copy, not everything worked for me. If he had included at least a couple of examples with the open source Inkscape, this would have been a 5 star rating.The second thing I would have liked to see a little different is more statistical info to go along with the visualizations. We often visualize data to help make decisions. Nathan shows how to display a LOESS line to see the best fit for the curve, but he stops there. Maybe discussing R² ( correlation coefficient) analysis to determine whether the values are are a good match would help me feel better about analyzing the data beyond just visualization.That said, this is an extremely well written book and easily deserves 4 stars. Dig up an old copy of Illustrator (preferably CSx versions) and enjoy this book.
Tools usage, not design pricinples
52 of 56 people found the following review helpful
If you are looking for a book on how to use Illustrator and R to create various visual elements, this book may be for you. It shows you examples using various tools, and is more of a guide to creating charts and other elements using those tools. This book is not for people not interested in using R or Illustrator or Excel for that matter. If you are looking for a book that will outline how you should THINK about presenting data that you have, and give you constructive ideas, this book is not for you. The FlowingData blog has a bunch of great tips for that, so that is what I was expecting. However, when I saw a bunch of screenshots and sample code, this is more of a programming guide than a design book.In addition, the first chapter in the preview is not representative of the book, IMO.A more apt title would be "How to use Adobe Illustrator and R to Create Charts".If you are looking for a 'How To' guide, this might very well be your book. I'm rating it low because I was expecting a book that would give me design principles and guides, not show me code samples and tool screenshots.
Nice book on visualizing with R