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 enlarge | Author: Ben Fry
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $39.99
Buy New: $22.85
You Save: $17.14 (43%)
New (35) Used (5) from $22.85
Avg. Customer Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 8985
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
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Visualizing Data: Process, Code and Tools! March 8, 2008
1 out of 5 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
13 out of 15 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.
 Good introduction if you don't know how to code February 4, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Processing looks like a very powerful tool and this book serves as a good introduction to both programming and computer visuals. It's nicely paced but if you are a professional software engineer looking to harness processing you will find yourself skimming the whole book in search for advanced material.
In particular the use of java for a whole lot of tasks including text parsing and data mining leads to very tedious and verbose code where a few lines of perl or awk would have done the job.
Overall this is a good book if you are somewhat new to programming. Else this will make for too short a read.
Mixed feelings February 3, 2008
44 out of 50 found this review helpful
This book allowed me to quickly create some simple applications using the processing API. So, in that respect, the book was successful. However, the book falls short in three respects.
1) One would expect a book with the title "Visualizing Data" to be crammed with pictures showing many different data visualizations. However, this book has relatively few. Every colleague of mine who passed by my desk and picked up the book had the exact same reaction.
2) The processing language is touted as a means for people unfamiliar with programming to get up to speed with visualization. However, I would be very surprised if anyone with little programming experience would get much out of this book.
3) Don't expect to use this book as a reference for the processing language. It is basically just a collection of half explained examples. Consider for example the function smooth(). This function appears in almost every example but forget about trying to find an explanation of what the function does in the book.
The book is probably worth buying to get up to speed quickly but plan on spending a significant amount of time sifting through the processing.org website and other online resources before being able to get anything non-trivial done. And if you don't already know Java then don't expect to accomplish anything even modestly complex without a lot of outside help.
 Outstanding January 22, 2008
21 out of 24 found this review helpful
This is an exceptionally good book on a specialist topic by one of my design heroes. Where most data visualization books present either pages of (often quite ugly) charts and diagrams, but with no tools to create them, Fry manages here to combine both programming skills and a real understanding of design. It's the rare book that manages to do two disciplines really well. Though it's full of code, Visualizing Data is so much more than a technical manual.
This is definitely a programming book; I agree with another reviewer here that if you're already comfortable with Java you'll find this much easier going. But Fry builds his code examples up sensibly, and explains what's going on. A smart Flash developer or Processing dabbler (like me) really won't have any trouble following along. The examples move from simple plotting of points, to time-based animation, to complex correlation, and into more complex visualizations. And it's not just drawing pixels: there are long and useful sections on data acquisition techniques, approaches to parsing and formatting data. Luckily, Fry's a really good writer, and is able to keep these topics from getting dull.
But the great thing about Visualizing Data is that it's also a *design* book--a real one--with thoughtful considerations about use of color, typography, and the "feel" of interaction. Fry's data visualizations are worthy of being in any of Edward Tufte's books. I nearly stood up and cheered when Fry took a few paragraphs in the middle of a code explanation to talk about why the em-dash character and non-lining numerals made the typography of a particular example better. That level of detail is, I think, totally absent from any other book like this.
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