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Ask HN: Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization?

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Ask HN: Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization?

#1

Post by lukev »

My day job has me working on a project that has vast amounts of data available in tabular form, but no way to analyze the data except to search it and display it in more tables. Pages and pages of tables.

I'd love to build a way to query the data and display the results visually, and I'm looking for books that demonstrate various techniques for visualizing data that (in many cases) is quite complex. Right now, my experience doesn't really extend beyond basic pie/bar/scatter graphs.

I've heard amazing things about Tufte, but looking at the previews of his books on Amazon they seem mostly focused on artistic presentations of information - something a marketer or analyst would create manually, not dynamic charts generated from terabytes of data. Is that the case? Does it still have useful information for the sort of thing I'm doing, or can anyone recommend something more suitable?

Re: Ask HN: Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization?

#3

Post by mcantor »

I've read The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Tufte, and I think it would benefit you even though you are not talking about manually generating charts. For example, he talks about how it's easy to be misleading with a chart based on how you calibrate the axes, which is something you'd still need to do even with dynamically generated visualizations.

Re: Ask HN: Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization?

#4

Post by evgen »

duck wrote: post #2

I would check out Visualizing Data - http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596514556 Also, I enjoy this site http://flowingdata.com .

Visualizing Data is a good choice, but I would also suggest you note the recent string of critiques of content-free visualization on flowingdata and start out with Tufte if you are new to the field.

Re: Ask HN: Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization?

#5

Post by alilja »

Edward Tufte's book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is a monumental book. He writes not about how to make your graphs look pretty, but how to display vast quantities of data and distill them down into useful graphics that communicate themselves effectively.

He provides examples of good and bad graphs, but more importantly, explains what exactly it is that makes those examples good and bad, and further generalizes it so you understand how to make good visualizations. If you don't want to shell out the money for it, it's probably at your library (remember those?).

Additionally, if I were you, I'd stay way from statistical approaches to displaying information unless you have some background or are willing to learn about it -- it tends to be highly technical and is probably too complex for what you're trying to do. Basic stats might help you, but not as much as Tufte will.

Re: Ask HN: Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization?

#6

Post by ajdecon »

To me it sounds like you want to be using a tool like Matlab or matplotlib in python to automatically generate various types of plots from your data. There are a wide variety of books about Matlab, and I don't really know one better than the rest. For python, there's "Beginning Python Visualization" by Vaingast. It's pretty introductory, but provides good starting points. The matplotlib web site also provides a gallery of example plots with code.

Re: Ask HN: Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization?

#7

Post by j-g-faustus »

The Tufte books are brilliant. For dynamic charts, his first book (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information) is the most relevant, it covers the theory - how to tell a good representation from a bad one - and the basics.

Readings in Information Visualization ( http://www.amazon.co.uk/Readings-Information-Visualization-I... ) is a collection of papers covering a wide range of techniques for a wide range of tasks.

Apart from that, it's mostly a matter of picking up interesting ideas wherever you find them. flowingdata.com is nice, same with http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/

Re: Ask HN: Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization?

#8

Post by anonjon »

You might want to check out the processing language at:

http://www.processing.org/

And look at the examples section.

A lot of it is about artistic sorts of representation, but it is programmatic. There are a few books that the authors of the language wrote, including the visualizing data book mentioned by duck. (They are mentioned on the front page of processing.org).

It is a pretty neat language, and the core functionality can be used as a Java library. (I have been working through the 'processing a programming handbook', and it is more about using the language than about ways to display the data (So you might want to pick one of the other books)).

Re: Ask HN: Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization?

#9

Post by Anon84 »

Leland Wilkinson's "The Grammar of Graphics" http://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Graphics-Leland-Wilkinson/dp/0... is also excellent and fully implemented in the R programming language/statistics package ( http://www.amazon.com/ggplot2-Elegant-Graphics-Data-Analysis... )

Re: Ask HN: Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization?

#10

Post by wdewind »

Tufte is great, but he's extremely heavy and a bit dated. He is about 80% brilliant 20% completely missing the point. It's very strange.

If you are looking for a smaller book I've found the WSJ Guide to Information Graphics by Dona Wong to be pretty decent and pretty straight forward, and it's about 100 pages. It's not too focused on finance either, although that's what I got it for (I do front end development for financial analysis company - lots of charting).

http://www.amazon.com/Street-Journal-Guide-Information-Graph...

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