Visualizing Data | 
 enlarge | Author: Ben Fry
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $39.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 20049
Format: Illustrated
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 382
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7 x 0.8
ISBN: 0596514557
Dewey Decimal Number: 001.4226028566
EAN: 9780596514556
ASIN: 0596514557
Publication Date: January 11, 2008
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Product Description
Enormous 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 Great book, bad title May 23, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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 [..]
An excellent guide May 22, 2008
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.
 Where's The Visualized Data?? April 28, 2008
11 out of 24 found this review helpful
'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
Visualizing Data: Process, Code and Tools! March 8, 2008
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
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!
Little more than a Processing Environment tutorial February 20, 2008
10 out of 12 found this review helpful
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.
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