Customer Reviews

The Elements of Graphing Data

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Tufte shows you why it's important to do graphs well. Cleveland shows you _how_.

The last quarter of the book details experiments in human visual perception that rank how well we detect certain things: relative angles not on a common baseline (i.e. pie charts) justly come out at the bottom of the list.

One of a only handful of books I've labelled "JXH ONLY". If I loan you my copy, know that you are special.

William Cleveland clearly describes how data can be presented to great effect. His description of visual perception spell out the "how to's" of graphing data. While many graphing programs are available in today's high technology environment, Cleveland's descriptions of how data can be presented into graphical format is enlightening. The book provides great examples of both superior and poor graphing presentation, focusing on how to encode graphs to allow for straightforward data analysis.

"The Elements of Graphiing Data" is a must for those who graph scientific data.

This was handed to me during my undergrad years, in fact one could not graduate unless one mastered this. I have relied upon it heavily during my consulting work, and now use it extensively in oil-gas, business, and industrial consulting. Data has to be presented accurately, and sometimes the big picture can easily be conveyed with a single graph, but caution must be taken when reading it. This book takes graph making to a new level. I bring it with me during board meetings, research meetings, etc. Big in the oil-gas sector.

Mr. Cleveland takes a topic which sounds very dry and makes it interesting with simple descriptions of methods for displaying quantitative data and illustrations of "do's" and "don'ts". It should be mandatory reading for anyone who is creating charts and graphs for widespread consumption.