Sage Publications Data Visualisation: A Handbook for Data Driven Design

What’s the point of a book on data vis if you can’t make out the data visualizations? Love this book so much I opted for the printed version, which I rarely do for reference books anymore since it’s such a timesaver to be able to search within text. I’m really sorry I didn’t get the digital version instead. The overall print quality is lacking: both text and images have a faded appearance, and the ink, particularly dark colors, has very poor saturation and contrast. The images are way too small and low resolution (even using magnifying readers the highly detailed reference images are blurry and unreadable). The page layout may look great on a tablet or computer screen, but the tiny example charts, gray background and (slightly darker) gray <9pt font make for very difficult reading (see Chapter 6). It still has great content, but I may have to double down and get the digital version so I can “zoom in.”

There are many books out there that can help you with visualisation design techniques. However, there are few that guide you through the pre-design stages, such as initial thinking, editorial decisions and chart selection. Most just get carried away with the beauty of visualisation and jump straight into guidance on style, colours, symbols, images etc.. In the main these books are completely silent when it comes to challenging yourself with the question of "what is it you want to say?" and "is a chart the right way of saying it?".That what makes this book different. (Possibly unique?) It covers every stage of the process from beginning to end, including those important pre-design activities. It's designed for use as a reference book, for quick bits of advice, or as a methodology which takes you by the hand as you work through the preparation and development of your visualisation.It contains an excellent gallery of chart types with clear guidance on which are best suited to particular situations. It's complemented by an online gallery which is being continually updated with examples of each type, produced by a variety of tools.Whether your a complete novice, or an accomplished expert, there's something in this book for you. If you want to create visualisations with real purpose and only want one book on the subject then this is the one.

I do not have the first edition, so I can't compare this edition (2nd) to the first.This book is a good reference, it contains many kinds of plots and visualisations as well as explanations for when and how to use each. 49 types of visualisations are explored in depth. This is the part that I think is the most interesting.The author walks you through the different steps involved in the visualisation design process, and the multiple caveats that a visualiser can fall into.The good: lots and lots of plotsThe bad: lots of text for a book about visualisationFinally, I think it's a good reference to have so I'm giving it 5 stars.

Worked great for my class

Bought this book because of the positive review of a fellow student.It's an excellent book for everyone who is in need of conceptional tools to approach and break down their visualisation task.The target audience is more likely anyone approaching visualisation for the first time or more experienced visualisers who would like to read more about how the author approaches his work - aka copying bits and pieces of his thinking.