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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?

#21

Post by revorad »

devonrt wrote: post #19
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.

Yeah in that sense R is a better choice, but to make good looking graphs in R takes a bit of learning.

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

#22

Post by watmough »

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…

Yes, the books are excellent, great reads, though the first one as you say is the essential one.

Once you read these, you will start seeing 'Data Ducks' everywhere! I speak from experience.

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

#23

Post by lukev »

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…

Any experience with Incanter? Supposedly it's a port of R to Clojure, and since I love Clojure and everything else is already running on the JVM I'd lean towards using it as opposed to another standalone program if it's any good.

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

#24

Post by matrix »

wdewind wrote: post #10

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 fi…

I second this. I found his books interesting, but a sizable portion of the content is opinion rather than facts that are demonstrated via studies and the like. They're fun to look at, and there's a few important principles in them, but they're more of a coffee table book than a real reference.

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

#25

Post by johnwatson11218 »

revorad wrote: post #21
devonrt wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah in that sense R is a better choice, but to make good looking graphs in R takes a bit of learning.

I just got the book "R in Action" from the Manning MEAP program. Chapter 3 is all about the graphing capabilities built into R. I had a hard time trying to learn that stuff from the online docs but I find the book very easy to follow.

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

#26

Post by lukev »

alilja wrote: post #18
dca wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Hm... In my experience, that's the best part of projects, is being able to learn something new while doing them.

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

#27

Post by phren0logy »

lukev wrote: post #23
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…

Any experience with Incanter? Supposedly it's a port of R to Clojure, and since I love Clojure and everything else is already running on the JVM I'd lean towards using it as opposed to another standalone program if it's any good.

I have used it, but as a warning I'm not an expert user of R, Clojure, or Incanter. Incanter is very pleasant to use, because I personally much prefer coding in Clojure to R. The R language is powerful, but I don't find it obvious at all. You can also use Processing from Clojure if you need to roll your own charts, in addition to the very capable charting library that's already there to handle most routine visualization.

That said, Incanter is immature compared to R. If Incanter does what you need, it might be a great fit, but R has a huge community and list of libraries right now. There's an R to Clojure bridge, but if you don't yet know R I'm not sure it's very helpful.

Finally, Incanter is developing at a break-neck pace. Even if it doesn't do what you want today, it might tomorrow. Literally. I'd love to see the user base grow, because Clojure seems like a perfect fit for statistical computing.

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

#28

Post by samratjp »

I had a similar situation except that I wasn't as smart as you to consider books in the first place.

But, I did use some really good tools. I highly recommend using Prefuse (yes, it's java but it ships with great examples and it's open source). If you like prefuse, then try flare (actionscript based). As far I know, prefuse supports querying from tables (my data backend was postgres). Here's prefuse: http://prefuse.org/ Here's flare:http://flare.prefuse.org/

And for a dash of inspiration and more ideas: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/

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

#29

Post by revorad »

johnwatson11218 wrote: post #25
revorad wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah in that sense R is a better choice, but to make good looking graphs in R takes a bit of learning.

I just got the book "R in Action" from the Manning MEAP program. Chapter 3 is all about the graphing capabilities built into R. I had a hard time trying to learn that stuff from the online docs but I find the book very easy to follow.

Oh cool, I haven't read that book, will look it up. The UseR series books are very good too, although a bit expensive. If you have access to a good University library, I recommend looking them up.

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

#30

Post by revorad »

lukev wrote: post #23
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…

Any experience with Incanter? Supposedly it's a port of R to Clojure, and since I love Clojure and everything else is already running on the JVM I'd lean towards using it as opposed to another standalone program if it's any good.

I haven't tried Incanter yet, but from what I've read about it, it sounds very interesting. Perhaps that is a good way to get started learning Clojure (like I'm learning Python via Matplotlib). Since Incanter is still in early stages of development, I think I'd still prefer R to do any serious work, because it's probably a lot more solid and has a lot more packages.
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