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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9868 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-11
• Format: Illustrated
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 382 pages

About the Author
Ben Fry received his doctorate from the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory and was the 2006-2007 Nierenberg Chair of Design for the Carnegie Mellon School of Design.. He worked with Casey Reas to develop Processing, which won a Golden Nica from the Prix Ars Electronica in 2005. Ben's work has received a New Media Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, and been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Ars Electronica, the 2002 Whitney Biennial and the 2003 Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial.

Customer Reviews

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 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
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??
'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