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 to convey 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.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 15 Ratings

thoughtful and fairly useful - 2009-03-17
Reviewer Rating:
It's important to remember that this book is not as general as it first appears. The discussions in it can be applied to another environment like Matlab or R, but not the examples. However, it is not merely a Processing tutorial. It does a good job of layout out the stages that one must go through in the process of creating a visualization from a dataset. Fry lays out the basic steps at the beginning, then goes through them repeatedly in a number of very different applications. Following along is relatively easy, though I really wish the author had provided a single URL to go get everything rather than give out URLs piecemeal throughout the book.

I should repeat that this is not merely a Processing tutorial. If it were, it would fall short on a number of counts, including using a number of commands without adequately explaining them, and omitting discussion of things that a Processing programmer is likely to need to know. This is still a good introduction to the language, though (it was my introduction) and offers enough insight into what the language and environment can do without getting too bogged down in the mechanics or design philosophy.

Good primer to get you started - 2008-09-21
Reviewer Rating:
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 :-)

it could do with more different graphs, but then again I'd rather get a complete explenation about a few graphs so I understand them completely, than a quick runthrough of many graphs and ending up not knowing much about any of them.

Your milage may vary depending on your level of experience, but I'd recommend this book to relatively experienced programmers who need to get started with graphing data.

A good book for learning Processing - 2009-09-11
Reviewer Rating:
a good book . On one hand for learning Processing on the other hand for (basic) visualizing techniques. A lot of examples.
Only the paper quality of the cover is at least at my copy quite poor. But thats a problem of O-Reilly not of the author.

Best programming book of the year - 2009-08-20
Reviewer Rating:
This book is the perfect blend of practical examples and light theory. The chapter projects are fast to develop and exciting to work with. It is easy to take the tools that Ben Fry gives you and make your own projects with them. I read a lot of tech books, and this is by far the best one that I have come across in quite some time.

Not what I expected, but very interesting - 2009-06-05
Reviewer Rating:
If you are looking at getting into the processing programming language, this book is tops. If you are looking to learn more about how to generally visualize data (types, best practice, etc) then this book may not be it.

I bought the book after reading the first chapter at Adobe MAX 2008 and then just ordered it from Amazon. To my surprise (both good and a little disappointing) the book was truly about the processing programming language.

Overall the book is very well written and I got to dabble a little in the coding to create some of the visuals. Once I figure out the things on my plate (work and personal) I will probably come back and try to see if processing is right for me and my projects.

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