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Visualizing Data (Paperback)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: parsing data, processing core, multiple days, United States, Advanced Graph Example, Year Figure (more...)

3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)

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Editorial Reviews

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.

About the Author

Ben Fry earned his Ph.D. at the MIT Media Laboratory and is a designer in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Product Details

Paperback: 366 pages
Publisher: O'Reilly Media; illustrated edition edition (January 11, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0596514557
ISBN-13: 978-0596514556
Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 0.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #21,312 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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#6 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Computer Science > Modeling & Simulation
#8 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Databases > Database Design
#13 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Graphic Design > Website Architecture & Usability

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Inside This Book (learn more)

Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
parsing data, processing core, multiple days, import library, viewable date, treemap library, int losses, sketch folder, void setup, animation thread, void draw, int wins, int kind, main tab, data folder, int col, int code, int pos, int level

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
United States, Advanced Graph Example, Year Figure, American League, Time Series, Text Markup Languages, Integrating Processing, Getting Started, Deployment Considerations, San Francisco, Flying Through Files, Drawing Axis Labels, Add File, Acquiring Data, Census Bureau, More Complicated Graph, San Diego, Improving the Treemap Display, Using the Preprocessed Data, Create Font, Interpolation Between Data Sets, Simple Graph Demo, Kansas City, Connect Points, Chi White Sox

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

	63% buy the item featured on this page: Visualizing Data 3.8 out of 5 stars (15) $26.39
	20% buy Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists 4.9 out of 5 stars (16) $32.60
	6% buy Learning Processing: A Beginner's Guide to Programming Images, Animation, and Interaction (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics) 4.9 out of 5 stars (16) $44.95
	6% buy Programming Interactivity: A Designer's Guide to Processing, Arduino, and Openframeworks 4.8 out of 5 stars (6) $31.50

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Customer Reviews

15 Reviews

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

Average Customer Review

3.8 out of 5 stars (15 customer reviews)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

73 of 83 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Mixed feelings, February 3, 2008

By	Salvatore R. Mangano (Oyster Bay, NY United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

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29 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Little more than a Processing Environment tutorial, February 20, 2008

By	Samuel Crank "User Interface Specialist" (Canton, GA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

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32 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding, January 22, 2008

By	Andrew Otwell "heyotwell" (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)

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.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars A good book for learning Processing
a good book . On one hand for learning Processing on the other hand for (basic) visualizing techniques. A lot of examples. Read more

Published 2 months ago by Markus Greim

5.0 out of 5 stars Best programming book of the year
This book is the perfect blend of practical examples and light theory. The chapter projects are fast to develop and exciting to work with. Read more

Published 2 months ago by Noah Spahn

3.0 out of 5 stars Not what I expected, but very interesting
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... Read more

Published 5 months ago by Walter Kolcz

5.0 out of 5 stars thoughtful and fairly useful
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... Read more

Published 8 months ago by John Murphy

3.0 out of 5 stars Good primer to get you started
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... Read more

Published 14 months ago by Vincent Elschot

2.0 out of 5 stars Just an introduction to some library
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... Read more

Published 14 months ago by Marcin Kasperski

5.0 out of 5 stars 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... Read more

Published 18 months ago by Jerome Cukier

5.0 out of 5 stars 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... Read more

Published 18 months ago by Jeffrey K. Tyzzer

2.0 out of 5 stars Where's The Visualized Data??
'Visualizing Data' is a book that is supposed to discuss how data is presented, sorted, stored and examined. Read more

Published 18 months ago by Daniel McKinnon

4.0 out of 5 stars Visualizing Data: Process, Code and Tools!
Ben Fry hits the mark!

The author jumps right into describing the process in Chapter 1, "The Seven Stages of Visualizing Data. Read more

Published 20 months ago by Brian K. Duck

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