Visualize This

[Paul Butler]

Has anybody ordered this book yet? Nathan Yau has done some pretty
good work, so it could be pretty interesting.

http://book.flowingdata.com/

-- Paul

[Samson Hu]

I've been following this as well. Its pretty cheap...

[Adrian Petrescu]

Coincidentally, ordered this on the weekend:

The following items were included in this shipment:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
    Qty                           Item        Price Shipped     Subtotal
---------------------------------------------------------------------
      1        The Visual Miscellaneum   CDN$ 18.80     1   CDN$ 18.80

      1  Visualize This: The FlowingDa   CDN$ 30.09     1   CDN$ 30.09

Sold by Amazon.ca, Inc - taxed

Should arrive by Wednesday. Is there anything about it you wanna know?

Cheers,

Adrian

[Paul Butler]

Mostly I'm wondering what sort of person and experience level it's
aimed at. For example, whether it focuses more on the creative/design/
storytelling process of visualization, or the technical creation of
it. I'll probably get a copy either way, just wondering what to
expect.

Let us know what you think when the book arrives.

-- Paul

[Adrian Petrescu]

It arrived today, actually.

It can't seem to make up its own mind about whether its an implementation book or not. On the one hand, it sometimes goes into detail about how to make minor visual tweaks in R (on page 98, it spends two pages describing, with screenshots, all the optional parameters to barplot()). On the other hand, pretty much every chapter of this book uses a completely different tool to do the work, literally everything from R to Adobe Flash to Python, and it takes each of these from scratch, so you can imagine the lack of thoroughness for any one of them.

On the other hand, it covers a lot of visualizations with, I'm sensing, a particular emphasis on spatial data. Which should be right up your alley, Paul :) But the variety is stunning; traditional charts and graphs, treemaps, heatmaps, scatterplot matrices, Hans Rosling-style bubble plots, spider charts, and various animation trickeries all get meaty sections, with quite pretty full-color illustrations.

I view both you and Lisa as somewhere in the pantheon of data visualization Gods, so I don't know how much of it will be useful to you. But if you can get over the sections where he (literally) teaches you how to get Adobe Flex running in Eclipse, it looks like a pretty interesting survey of techniques.

Hope that helps. I can answer specific questions too now that I have it in my hands.

Cheers,

Adrian

[Samson Hu]

I bought this book, why not?

I'm very new to this and I like the "what do you need to do" => "here
is how you do it" approach. Nice graphics, easy read. Tons of
examples.

I will post more as I dive into this.