5 classic books on data visualization! Beginners and professionals alike can learn a lot!
Data visualization has been an important skill in recent decades as it can handle a variety of difficult problems. The following 5 classics take you from the theory behind the scenes. Feel free to share your thoughts with me.
- Fundamentals of Data Visualization : A Primer on Making Informative and Compelling Figures
- Storytelling with Data : A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals
- Data at Work: Best practices for creating effective charts and information graphics in Microsoft Excel
- The Functional Art: An introduction to information graphics and visualization
- The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication
Fundamentals of Data Visualization : A Primer on Making Informative and Compelling Figures
Effective visualization is the best way to communicate information from the increasingly large and complex datasets in the natural and social sciences. But with the increasing power of visualization software today, scientists, engineers, and business analysts often have to navigate a bewildering array of visualization choices and options.
This practical book takes you through many commonly encountered visualization problems, and it provides guidelines on how to turn large datasets into clear and compelling figures. What visualization type is best for the story you want to tell? How do you make informative figures that are visually pleasing? Author Claus O. Wilke teaches you the elements most critical to successful data visualization.(resource)
Storytelling with Data : A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals
Don’t simply show your data tell a story with it! Storytelling with Data teaches you the fundamentals of data visualization and how to communicate effectively with data. You’ll discover the power of storytelling and the way to make data a pivotal point in your story. The lessons in this illuminative text are grounded in theory, but made accessible through numerous real-world examples ready for immediate application to your next graph or presentation. Storytelling is not an inherent skill, especially when it comes to data visualization, and the tools at our disposal don’t make it any easier. This book demonstrates how to go beyond conventional tools to reach the root of your data, and how to use your data to create an engaging, informative, compelling story.(resource)
Data at Work: Best practices for creating effective charts and information graphics in Microsoft Excel
Information visualization is a language. Like any language, it can be used for multiple purposes. A poem, a novel, and an essay all share the same language, but each one has its own set of rules. The same is true with information visualization: a product manager, statistician, and graphic designer each approach visualization from different perspectives.(resource)
The Functional Art: An introduction to information graphics and visualization
Unlike any time before in our lives, we have access to vast amounts of free information. With the right tools, we can start to make sense of all this data to see patterns and trends that would otherwise be invisible to us. By transforming numbers into graphical shapes, we allow readers to understand the stories those numbers hide. In this practical introduction to understanding and using information graphics, you’ll learn how to use data visualizations as tools to see beyond lists of numbers and variables and achieve new insights into the complex world around us. Regardless of the kind of data you’re working with-business, science, politics, sports, or even your own personal finances-this book will show you how to use statistical charts, maps, and explanation diagrams to spot the stories in the data and learn new things from it.(resource)
The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication
Every day, at work, home, and school, we are bombarded with vast amounts of free data collected and shared by everyone and everything from our co-workers to our calorie counters. In this highly anticipated follow-up to The Functional Art — Alberto Cairo’s foundational guide to understanding information graphics and visualization — the respected data visualization professor explains in clear terms how to work with data, discover the stories hidden within, and share those stories with the world in the form of charts, maps, and infographics. In The Truthful Art, Cairo transforms elementary principles of data and scientific reasoning into tools that you can use in daily life to interpret data sets and extract stories from them.(resource)
These are the 5 classic books on data visualization. Have you started reading yet? Having a small amount of important information can help your supervisor or colleague find insights soon. Let’s start making convincing information charts! Leave a comment and share your reading experience with me!
