Visualizing Data: Exploring and Explaining Data with the Processing Environment 1st Edition

by Ben Fry (Author)

46 ratings

ISBN-13: 978-0596514556

ISBN-10: 0596514557

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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 to convey 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.

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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Ben Fry received his doctorate from the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory and was the 2006-2007 Nierenberg Chair of Design for the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. He worked with Casey Reas to develop Processing, which won a Golden Nica from the Prix Ars Electronica in 2005. Ben's work has received a New Media Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, and been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Ars Electronica, the 2002 Whitney Biennial and the 2003 Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial.

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Product details

Publisher : O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (January 11, 2008)
Language : English
Paperback : 384 pages
ISBN-10 : 0596514557
ISBN-13 : 978-0596514556
Item Weight : 1.55 pounds
Dimensions : 7 x 0.6 x 9.19 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #287,519 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #43 in Computer Simulation (Books)
- #75 in Information Theory
- #143 in User Experience & Website Usability

Customer Reviews:
46 ratings

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2 star		5%
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Janishasha

Good rental for coursework

Reviewed in the United States on June 24, 2018

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You know this is a book on Processing, and gives great copy and paste examples. The only thing I don't like, is that some of the examples don't work. Like handling different tabs or sketches that use the same function code like, public draw() in the umbrella host sketch and draw() on the other sketch, because the program won't work.

One person found this helpful

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J. Cauhape

An outstanding book for the right audience.

Reviewed in the United States on November 28, 2011

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IF you are using the Processing IDE and API, and if you are new to producing graphical
displays of data, then I can think of no better book for you than this one. It discusses
the why as well as the how, and provides code examples and some images of the results.
What I liked about this book, beside the concrete examples, are the discussions about
how to think about each step of the process from selecting the data through to the final
step of refining the display. There are issues that are not obvious to the graphical
display newbie, and they are brought up, and a good approach given.

On the other hand, if you are a programmer who is already writing sophisticated
graphical displays, and looking for a language neutral book on general design, then
this will probably not be a satisfying purchase.

4 people found this helpful

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John Murphy

thoughtful and fairly useful

Reviewed in the United States on March 16, 2009

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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.

7 people found this helpful

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Kenneth Spry

Life Saver

Reviewed in the United States on March 23, 2014

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Processing captured my attention a few months back. I'm a UXer / wannabe artist who is new to programming, and I was immediately smitten with the visual art and data visualizations that I saw for Processing. I thought that this could be the tool fun enough and visual enough to teach me the principles of programming while making useful things relevant to my work. I've read several books on Processing, and, while I've found all of them helpful and fun (especially in regard to learning the ins and outs of the language and environment), this one has helped me put my skills to the test more than the others, mostly because I can't help but imagine different possibilities as I work through the tutorials. There are better ways and worse ways to represent data, and there are clear objectives that I'm trying to reach, unlike my experiences with visual art and Processing where I can let myself get away with almost anything. Luckily, Fry's got it figured out, and the examples are both pleasant looking and fun to interact with. Going through this book has been a joy, and I'm building my repertoire of code that I'm sure will prove useful in future projects. Maybe after I learn a bit more I'll be able to create art with confidence, but, for now, this is a lot of fun.

One person found this helpful

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Walter Kolcz

Not what I expected, but very interesting

Reviewed in the United States on June 5, 2009

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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.

5 people found this helpful

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ALQ

Good introduction if you don't know how to code

Reviewed in the United States on February 4, 2008

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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.

4 people found this helpful

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Indradeep Dasgupta

easy to understand

Reviewed in the United States on January 1, 2015

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Very lucidly written, easy to understand. Even though I've moved on from Processing, I'm still benefiting from the basics of data organization and setup that are essential before we can actually visualize it. Specifically, it gives a fairly good idea of how data frames should be constructed and what functions it should have that make them versatile, once they've been setup.

One person found this helpful

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bailey

Good purchase

Reviewed in the United States on August 27, 2019

Verified Purchase

Good book and good working examples

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Stevee

Good tool but fading technology

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 6, 2013

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This is a well written book that takes you through using the language along with issues of gathering and representing data. However, Java (from which Processing is derived) is not always available in clients' browsers so you may want to consider its javascript twin, processing.js

One person found this helpful

paul

Two Stars

Reviewed in Canada on February 21, 2015

Verified Purchase

very limited use.

One person found this helpful

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