The Elements of Graphing Data [Import] [Paperback]

William S. Cleveland (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 323 pages
• Publisher: Wadsworth (1985)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0534037305
• ISBN-13: 978-0534037307
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,460,293 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stuff U Hadn't ThoughtOf, StartHere:BecomeMasterDataVisualzr, April 20, 2004

By 

Mark A. Weiss (Germantown, MD United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: The Elements of Graphing Data (Hardcover)

Even if you've been graphing for decades or are a scientific or statistical sophisticate, this book is more valuable than you'd guess. You may know some stuff to help make your graphing better, but I bet there are many more principles, features, and techniques you simply never thought of. This book has these. But for even more incisive visualizations, you should get also Cleveland's "Visualizing Data". You'll need both books really. (There's not much overlap.) Even though making use of graphical perception principles increases the power of your graphs (the main topic of "Elements of Graphing Data"), there are even more incisive graph types you need to learn about; only a couple of these are in "Elements"; the others are in "Visualizing Data". After digesting Cleveland's two books, you will be a master data-behaviour elucidator. Once in a great while you may need the old statistical inference paradigm (test-statistics & p-values), but much more often you will be so glad you have the power of Cleveland's visualization paradigm to use instead. But again, you will need both "Elements of Graphing Data" and "Visualizing Data". Start with "Elements" though. The book reads easily, is interesting and has a bonus for those into perceptual psychology. A neato tidbit: the author's research results on graphical perception were given in part as graphs -- leading to the nifty "the medium is the message" thing. No matter what aspect of "Elements" you look at, it is simply marvelous -- all substance, and several points (not just a single point for a whole book like Tufte did in his book).