Visualizing Data

I'm short of superlatives for this book or more generally for the work of Ben Fry.

In my line of work, how people think of graphs is very much influenced by what is possible to do in Excel without changing the default settings too much.
Enter Processing, a data visualization-oriented language, which makes it easy to create custom visualizations, tailored for the problem you want to address. There is a growing community around Processing and a number of truly incredible graphs that have been created with just a few lines of code. Ben Fry's own work, which ranges from simplistic to very sophisticated, is nothing short of mind-blowing. Yet this book demystifies this and make it all look accessible.

It opens great perspectives for anyone interested in expressing their data graphically. Still, the title is misleading.

This is not a book about, say, editorial rules by which one should construct a visualization. It is not an abstract book that offers generic advice that can be used in whatever environment. For that kind of book, pick Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten or The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition - books which are consistent with Fry's approach, by the way. "Visualizing Data" is really a practical cookbook that will introduce you to Processing. It offers methodological insights, but which are mostly relevant in the Processing environment.

That being said, I highly recommend this book and keeping a close tab on [..]

This book was exactly what I was looking for--chapter eight alone was worth the cost of the book. A word to the wise: rather than assuming its contents from the title alone, read chapter one thoroughly to ensure that this book is right for you.

'Visualizing Data' is a book that is supposed to discuss how data is presented, sorted, stored and examined. Instead what we get is a 350+ page book that is jumbled with lots of code samples (why) and a small subset of data that is actually visualized. This is a really niche topic that I thought would be interesting to examine as I opened the book cover but thumbing through I saw few pictures (although there are a few in here that are good) and lots of java code. While it's interesting to see how data is outputted code-wise, from the book title I felt this would be more of a design discussion for the reader.

I can't recommend this book. There is too much code, too much content, and the code that is contained within is all Java. I didn't get much out of it and I feel that if less code and more pictures were added the end result would have been much more solid.

** NOT RECOMMENDED

Ben Fry hits the mark!

The author jumps right into describing the process in Chapter 1, "The Seven Stages of Visualizing Data."
He elaborates each of the stages with illustrations and examples.

In chapter 2, "Getting Started with Processing," Ben introduces a software tool (named Processing) that's available for download: www.processing.org/download.

From the site: "Processing is an open project initiated by Ben Fry and Casey Reas. It evolved from ideas explored in the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab."

And the remainder of the title details the various stages of visualizing data with sample code you can use to develop your own visualizations!

Based on the title and publisher's writeup I was expecting the book to provide in-depth coverage of various visual metaphors for understanding and manipulating data, such as "Designing Interfaces" by Tidwell, another O'Reilly book that I am very pleased with.

Unfortunately it would be more appropriate if the title (Visualizing Dta) and sub-title (Exploring and Explaining Data with the Processing Environment) were switched. This book is primarily a tutorial on using the Processing Environment (http://processing.org), showing you how to create various interactive charts and composed primarily of code examples.

In addition, the visualizations presented in the book are far from aesthetically pleasing. The Processing Environment has the capability to create visualizations that are not only functional, but beautiful as well. You can find a collection of visualizations at http://www.visualcomplexity.com, many of which were created with the Processing Environment.

In summary I am granting a 2-star rating because the book does not deliver the expected coverage of data visualization design and even in its explanation of the Processing Environment does not provide exemplary visualizations.