Customer Reviews

Visualizing Data: Exploring and Explaining Data with the Processing Environment

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book allowed me to quickly create some simple applications using the processing API. So, in that respect, the book was successful. However, the book falls short in three respects.

1) One would expect a book with the title "Visualizing Data" to be crammed with pictures showing many different data visualizations. However, this book has relatively few. Every colleague of mine who passed by my desk and picked up the book had the exact same reaction.

2) The processing language is touted as a means for people unfamiliar with programming to get up to speed with visualization. However, I would be very surprised if anyone with little programming experience would get much out of this book.

3) Don't expect to use this book as a reference for the processing language. It is basically just a collection of half explained examples. Consider for example the function smooth(). This function appears in almost every example but forget about trying to find an explanation of what the function does in the book.

The book is probably worth buying to get up to speed quickly but plan on spending a significant amount of time sifting through the processing.org website and other online resources before being able to get anything non-trivial done. And if you don't already know Java then don't expect to accomplish anything even modestly complex without a lot of outside help.

Based on the title and publisher's writeup I was expecting the book to provide in-depth coverage of various visual metaphors for understanding and manipulating data, such as "Designing Interfaces" by Tidwell, another O'Reilly book that I am very pleased with.

Unfortunately it would be more appropriate if the title (Visualizing Dta) and sub-title (Exploring and Explaining Data with the Processing Environment) were switched. This book is primarily a tutorial on using the Processing Environment (http://processing.org), showing you how to create various interactive charts and composed primarily of code examples.

In addition, the visualizations presented in the book are far from aesthetically pleasing. The Processing Environment has the capability to create visualizations that are not only functional, but beautiful as well. You can find a collection of visualizations at http://www.visualcomplexity.com, many of which were created with the Processing Environment.

In summary I am granting a 2-star rating because the book does not deliver the expected coverage of data visualization design and even in its explanation of the Processing Environment does not provide exemplary visualizations.

This is an exceptionally good book on a specialist topic by one of my design heroes. Where most data visualization books present either pages of (often quite ugly) charts and diagrams, but with no tools to create them, Fry manages here to combine both programming skills and a real understanding of design. It's the rare book that manages to do two disciplines really well. Though it's full of code, Visualizing Data is so much more than a technical manual.

This is definitely a programming book; I agree with another reviewer here that if you're already comfortable with Java you'll find this much easier going. But Fry builds his code examples up sensibly, and explains what's going on. A smart Flash developer or Processing dabbler (like me) really won't have any trouble following along. The examples move from simple plotting of points, to time-based animation, to complex correlation, and into more complex visualizations. And it's not just drawing pixels: there are long and useful sections on data acquisition techniques, approaches to parsing and formatting data. Luckily, Fry's a really good writer, and is able to keep these topics from getting dull.

But the great thing about Visualizing Data is that it's also a *design* book--a real one--with thoughtful considerations about use of color, typography, and the "feel" of interaction. Fry's data visualizations are worthy of being in any of Edward Tufte's books. I nearly stood up and cheered when Fry took a few paragraphs in the middle of a code explanation to talk about why the em-dash character and non-lining numerals made the typography of a particular example better. That level of detail is, I think, totally absent from any other book like this.

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 [..]

Processing looks like a very powerful tool and this book serves as a good introduction to both programming and computer visuals. It's nicely paced but if you are a professional software engineer looking to harness processing you will find yourself skimming the whole book in search for advanced material.

In particular the use of java for a whole lot of tasks including text parsing and data mining leads to very tedious and verbose code where a few lines of perl or awk would have done the job.

Overall this is a good book if you are somewhat new to programming. Else this will make for too short a read.

It's important to remember that this book is not as general as it first appears. The discussions in it can be applied to another environment like Matlab or R, but not the examples. However, it is not merely a Processing tutorial. It does a good job of layout out the stages that one must go through in the process of creating a visualization from a dataset. Fry lays out the basic steps at the beginning, then goes through them repeatedly in a number of very different applications. Following along is relatively easy, though I really wish the author had provided a single URL to go get everything rather than give out URLs piecemeal throughout the book.

I should repeat that this is not merely a Processing tutorial. If it were, it would fall short on a number of counts, including using a number of commands without adequately explaining them, and omitting discussion of things that a Processing programmer is likely to need to know. This is still a good introduction to the language, though (it was my introduction) and offers enough insight into what the language and environment can do without getting too bogged down in the mechanics or design philosophy.

The book is focused more on teaching processing than on visualization techniques and algorithms. I bought the book thinking that the emphasis will be on visualization examples but the book's main emphasis is on teaching how to program in processing. It is a very good book for learning the basics of processing but not good for someone looking to learn about techniques for presenting data visually.

If you are looking at getting into the processing programming language, this book is tops. If you are looking to learn more about how to generally visualize data (types, best practice, etc) then this book may not be it.

I bought the book after reading the first chapter at Adobe MAX 2008 and then just ordered it from Amazon. To my surprise (both good and a little disappointing) the book was truly about the processing programming language.

Overall the book is very well written and I got to dabble a little in the coding to create some of the visuals. Once I figure out the things on my plate (work and personal) I will probably come back and try to see if processing is right for me and my projects.

I bought this book hoping to learn something about data visualisation techniques - things like which kind of presentation use for which purpose, how to design understandable and readable graphs etc.

Instead, I found just an introduction to some Java toolkit. As an introduction to this toolkit the book is not bad - it is well written and have interesting examples and readable code snippets - but it just fails to provide the information the title promises.

This book may not be the ultimate reference for vualizing data, but it does give the reader a complete set of tools to start with; the theory on how to get the data in the first place, information on how graphs are built and read, and a programming tool to actually create the graphs with.

It does contain many sourcecodes which may seem pointless as you can just pcik them off the web, but being able to read the code while reading on the train is quite nice :-)

it could do with more different graphs, but then again I'd rather get a complete explenation about a few graphs so I understand them completely, than a quick runthrough of many graphs and ending up not knowing much about any of them.

Your milage may vary depending on your level of experience, but I'd recommend this book to relatively experienced programmers who need to get started with graphing data.