Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Book Review: Beautiful Visualization

Book Review: Beautiful Visualization Edited by Julie Steele and Noah Iliinsky: Publisher- O’Reilly: ISBN- 13: 978-1449379865


Beautiful Visualization is beautiful book in itself. It has essays from heavy weights from visualization field. The first chapter “On Beauty” is by editor Noah Iliinsky discusses subtleties of Beauty in the context of Visualization in lucid language. Examples quoted by Noah are excellent – Periodic Table and London Underground.

The last chapter “Visualization: Indexed” encompasses bigger picture of Visualization to help think beyond Blind Men’s Elephant. I think this chapter should be second one.

Rest of the chapters in the book covers, various tools and techniques of visualization from various fields – quantative data to medical imaging. Mostly all contributors of this book has one underlying theme – data visualization techniques are not only for visual representation but also for finding out missing (obvious and non obvious) information or at least indicating that information is missing.

From a software professional perspective, whole of the book may not be useful because of its generalist nature but it gives insight into visualization which I feel software professionals’ lack.

Certainly book is worth its price. I highly recommend book to anybody who is interested in software and visualization.

Disclaimer: I did not get paid to review this book, and I do not stand to gain anything if you buy the book. I have no relationship with the publisher or the author.

Further reading: Two complementary books are Information is Beautiful by David McCandless http://www.amazon.com/Information-Beautiful-David-McCandless/dp/0007294662 and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Display-Quantitative-Information/dp/096139210X

One can get more information about book and related topics from:

1. Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Visualization-Looking-through-Experts/dp/1449379869
2. Flipkart: http://www.flipkart.com/beautiful-visualization-julie-steele-noah-book-1449379869
3. Publisher – O’Reilly http://oreilly.com/catalog/0636920000617
4. Review at http://informationr.net/ir/reviews/revs378.html
5. Review at iProgrammer: http://www.i-programmer.info/bookreviews/6-graphics/1093-beautiful-visualization.html
6. Review at Dr Dobb’s: http://www.drdobbs.com/blog/archives/2010/07/beautiful_visua.html
7. List of Vizualization tools (2008): http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_best_tools_for_visualization.php
8. Five Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year – 2009: http://flowingdata.com/2009/12/16/5-best-data-visualization-projects-of-the-year-2009/
9. Examples of Data visualization: http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/06/50-great-examples-of-data-visualization/

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