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

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

#11

Post by wdewind »

j-g-faustus wrote: post #7

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…

Information is Beautiful is great for fun stuff, but there are a ton of bad practices on that site, it's not for serious infographics. Be careful copying from it unless you are really able to tell where he's having fun and where his charts are serious (because he's very capable of both).

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

#12

Post by j-g-faustus »

wdewind wrote: post #11
j-g-faustus wrote: post #7

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…

Information is Beautiful is great for fun stuff, but there are a ton of bad practices on that site, it's not for serious infographics. Be careful copying from it unless you are really able to tell where he's having fun and where his charts are serious (because he's very capable of both).

Agreed. I was assuming that you have read your Tufte :) and can tell informative visuals from those that are primarily pretty or entertaining.

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

#13

Post by dca »

alilja wrote: post #5

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…

> Edward Tufte's book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is a monumental book.

Agreed, its absolutely excellent. Thanks to Y Combinator for listing it in the book list.

> Additionally, if I were you, I'd stay way from statistical approaches to displaying information...

Not agreed. In my opinion you might have missed what I felt was a main point of that book: Always learn the appropriate statistics required to understand the data, choose a correct visualization method to communicate those statistics effectively, and once you've understood it fully, confirmed the results, and removed all the cruft, then publish it.

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

#14

Post by timwiseman »

If you are considering using Python, Beginning Python Visualization (http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Python-Visualization-Transfo... ) seems quite good to me. It is of course a niche product targetting though who intend to use Python though. If you are looking for a more broad based grounding in visualization it is probably not your best choice.

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

#15

Post by Flemlord »

I do a lot of charting for financial services software. The best practical book that I've found is The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics: The Dos and Don'ts of Presenting Data, Facts, and Figures. Simple but practical guidelines for displaying pie/line/area graphs.

But for your situation, check out some of these sites which focus on more complicated graphing techniques:

http://www.perceptualedge.com/examples.php

http://blogof.francescomugnai.com/2009/04/50-great-examples-...

http://interface.fh-potsdam.de/infodesignpatterns/news.php

http://patternbrowser.org/

http://webdesignledger.com/inspiration/15-stunning-examples-...

http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/

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

#17

Post by revorad »

I would highly recommend learning R (http://www.r-project.org/). It is very easy to directly query databases and R has many visualisation packages, including the awesome ggplot2 (http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/) based on the grammar of graphics. I'm writing an R graphs cookbook and my startup's visualisation product is also built on R (see profile and feel free to email me if you need any help).

Also, look at Ben Fry's Processing books (http://benfry.com/). Here's an introductory tutorial - http://blog.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/your-random-numbers-getti...).

If you're familiar with Python, check out Matplotlib (https://www.packtpub.com/matplotlib-python-development/book).

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

#18

Post by alilja »

dca wrote: post #13
alilja wrote: post #5

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…

> Edward Tufte's book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is a monumental book. Agreed, its absolutely excellent. Thanks to Y Combinator for listing it in the book list. > Additionally, if I were you, I'd stay way from statistical approaches to displaying information... Not agreed. In my opinion you might have missed what I felt was a main point of that book: Always learn the appropriate statistics require…

What I meant was to shy away from approaches that are PURELY based on statistics if you have no background in it, because it can get overwhelming quickly.

Of course, if it's worth it to invest the time required to have a fundamental understanding of statistics, by all means do so -- but if this is a one-time or a short-term project, I'm not sure the time commitment is worth it.

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

#19

Post by devonrt »

revorad wrote: post #17

I would highly recommend learning R ( http://www.r-project.org/ ). It is very easy to directly query databases and R has many visualisation packages, including the awesome ggplot2 ( http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/ ) based on the grammar of graphics. I'm writing an R graphs cookbook and my startup's visualisation product is also built on R (see profile and feel free to email me if you need any help). Also, look at Ben Fry's…

I like Processing, and you can do pretty much anything you want with it but I will point out that it was not necessarily built with charts, graphs, and plots in mind; it's relatively "low-level." Any type of graph or visualization you want will have to built pretty much from scratch with the primitives available. This might not put you off, but it's something to keep in mind.

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

#20

Post by gruseom »

aohtsab wrote: post #16

Fun fact - Tufte's in Arlington giving a talk and we're taking a 15 minute break right now. Compelling speaker and thrilling read (he's giving away four of his books to every attendee).

I attended a one-day seminar of Tufte's one time and agree that it was pretty good. But he was by no means "giving away" his books; they were built into the (considerable) price of the event. I also recall being amazed at how many people showed up. This was in a large hotel ballroom in SF and we were jam packed in there.

Another fun fact: when he couldn't get his first book (VDQI) published the way he wanted, he mortgaged his house and published it himself. Respect.

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