Binding: Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 001.4226028566 EAN: 9780596514556 Format: Illustrated ISBN: 0596514557 Label: O'Reilly Media, Inc. Manufacturer: O'Reilly Media, Inc. Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 382 Publication Date: January 11, 2008 Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc. Sales Rank: 35197 Studio: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Product DescriptionEnormous quantities of data go unused or underused today, simply because people can't visualize the quantities and relationships in it. Using a downloadable programming environment developed by the author, Visualizing Data demonstrates methods for representing data accurately on the Web and elsewhere, complete with user interaction, animation, and more. How do the 3.1 billion A, C, G and T letters of the human genome compare to those of a chimp or a mouse? What do the paths that millions of visitors take through a web site look like? With Visualizing Data, you learn how to answer complex questions like these with thoroughly interactive displays. We're not talking about cookie-cutter charts and graphs. This book teaches you how to design entire interfaces around large, complex data sets with the help of a powerful new design and prototyping tool called 'Processing.' Used by many researchers and companies to convey specific data in a clear and understandable manner, the Processing beta is available free. With this tool and Visualizing Data as a guide, you'll learn basic visualization principles, how to choose the right kind of display for your purposes, and how to provide interactive features that will bring users to your site over and over. This book teaches you: The seven stages of visualizing data -- acquire, parse, filter, mine, represent, refine, and interact How all data problems begin with a question and end with a narrative construct that provides a clear answer without extraneous details Several example projects with the code to make them work Positive and negative points of each representation discussed. The focus is on customization so that each one best suits what you want toconvey about your data set The book does not provide ready-made 'visualizations' that can be plugged into any data set. Instead, with chapters divided by types of data rather than types of display, you'll learn how each visualization conveys the unique properties of the data it represents -- why the data was collected, what's interesting about it, and what stories it can tell. Visualizing Data teaches you how to answer questions, not simply display information.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - Good primer to get you started
This book may not be the ultimate reference for vualizing data, but it does give the reader a complete set of tools to start with; the theory on how to get the data in the first place, information on how graphs are built and read, and a programming tool to actually create the graphs with.
It does contain many sourcecodes which may seem pointless as you can just pcik them off the web, but being able to read the code while reading on the train is quite nice :-)
Rating: - Just an introduction to some library
I bought this book hoping to learn something about data visualisation techniques - things like which kind of presentation use for which purpose, how to design understandable and readable graphs etc.
Instead, I found just an introduction to some Java toolkit. As an introduction to this toolkit the book is not bad - it is well written and have interesting examples and readable code snippets - but it just fails to provide the information the title promises.
Rating: - Great book, bad title
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 ... Read More
Rating: - An excellent guide
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.
Rating: - Where's The Visualized Data??
'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 ... Read More
- Good primer to get you started
- Just an introduction to some library
- Great book, bad title
