Fundamentals of Data Visualization: A Primer on Making Informative and Compelling Figures 1st Edition

by Claus O. Wilke (Author)

71 ratings

ISBN-13: 978-1492031086

ISBN-10: 1492031089

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Effective visualization is the best way to communicate information from the increasingly large and complex datasets in the natural and social sciences. But with the increasing power of visualization software today, scientists, engineers, and business analysts often have to navigate a bewildering array of visualization choices and options.

This practical book takes you through many commonly encountered visualization problems, and it provides guidelines on how to turn large datasets into clear and compelling figures. What visualization type is best for the story you want to tell? How do you make informative figures that are visually pleasing? Author Claus O. Wilke teaches you the elements most critical to successful data visualization.

Explore the basic concepts of color as a tool to highlight, distinguish, or represent a value
Understand the importance of redundant coding to ensure you provide key information in multiple ways
Use the book’s visualizations directory, a graphical guide to commonly used types of data visualizations
Get extensive examples of good and bad figures
Learn how to use figures in a document or report and how employ them effectively to tell a compelling story

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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Claus O. Wilke is a professor of Integrative Biology at The University of Texas at Austin. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics from the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. Claus is the author or coauthor of over 170 scientific publications, covering topics in computational biology, mathematical modeling, bioinformatics, evolutionary biology, protein biochemistry, virology, and statistics. He has also authored several popular R packages used for data visualization, such as cowplot and ggridges, and he is a contributor to the package ggplot2.

Product details

Item Weight : 1.8 pounds
Paperback : 390 pages
ISBN-10 : 1492031089
ISBN-13 : 978-1492031086
Product Dimensions : 7 x 0.7 x 9.1 inches
Publisher : O'Reilly Media; 1st Edition (April 23, 2019)
Language: : English

Best Sellers Rank: #48,929 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4 in Design & Graphics Software Books
- #12 in Computer Graphics
- #14 in Graphics & Multimedia Programming

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Chris Adami

This book makes you understand data visualization

Reviewed in the United States on May 1, 2019

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Wilke’s “Fundamentals of Data Visualization” fills an important niche: a manual for the professional data scientist who wants to convey the essence of data succinctly, accurately, and in an aesthetically pleasing way. Wilke shows that this is (perhaps surprisingly) difficult, and he does this by showing both good and bad examples of data visualization in order to make this point. The book really attempts to build up the reader’s intuition about what makes a good visualization chapter by chapter. By the end, the lessons learned have become so obvious that when going back to earlier chapters, a single glance at the figure is enough to remind you about what is good (or bad) in the example given. This is not a book that gives programming examples that tell the reader how to achieve a particular figure, and I think this is intentional. The emphasis is on understanding the principles of data visualization, not on supplying a hack for the next figure. (But for those who want to recreate a figure, Wilke provides the entire source code for the book on a web site). All in all, this is probably the best book on data visualization for the practicing scientist out there. The prose is clear and concise, the principles behind the choices he makes are clearly laid out, and the figures are clean and free of clutter. My only gripe is that the colors in the book appear to be somewhat flat and less intense than in the electronic version. Hopefully this can be remedied in the future.

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L. Reding

Reviewed in the United States on August 6, 2019

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As a working data scientist and recovering academic, I've been making data visualizations for a decade. I've read lots of books about data visualization, but there were few I found difficult to put down; this book has been an exception.

The principles in the book are solid and agree with my experience: following the guidelines in the book will help you craft more meaningful figures that resonant more deeply with your audience and allow you the freedom to move away from the production of criminally overwrought visualizations that are so common in academia and elsewhere.

In the process, Wilke gives very approachable, high-level forays into elementary statistics, PCA, and map projections that felt like welcome and complementary diversions. I would have liked to have read a bit more about how humans perceive different visualization types, plotting characters and the like and how empirical studies of human perception can inform our design of visualizations; this was sprinkled throughout the text but a chapter on it would have been welcome. But that's a minor point; the text is clear and the entire book is incredibly well thought-out.

The code for all the figures, should you want it, is online; if you are an R user (note that the book is language-agnostic), studying it will give you power to craft and tweak your figures to a degree to make even the Wickham's of the world jealous. Highly recommended.

3 people found this helpful

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FANTASTIC !

Reviewed in the United States on May 1, 2019

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I saw this book on a friend’s desk and had to get my own copy! I’ve read straight through a quarter of it already and it is so clear and straightforward that it makes all the ideas seem obvious. I had previously tried to absorb some works by Edward Tufte but found them overwhelming compared to this book. I’ve been an academic biologist for years and wish I’d had a book like this earlier in my career. The principles the author explains help me codify what I already intuitively sensed about various visual representations. It will be much easier now to design effective figures for my own work and to interpret at a glance the data of others! In fact I have already used a principle from these early chapters to improve a figure I’m working on for a manuscript. While extremely readable and appropriate for any layman, this book is a must for professionals representing data in any form, and in teaching graduate students how to communicate data. This book is so straight forward I would hope it could be used even in high schools where the basic important concepts would serve everybody entering this data-rich world!

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CDM

Strongly recommend to anyone who makes figures or enjoys thinking about how data is visualized

Reviewed in the United States on May 10, 2019

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What is it that makes a data visualization beautiful? How do you compose your own beautiful plot? This books is like a direct injection of solid design sense - engaging and rewarding enough to read straight through like a novel.

This book condenses figure design into its fundamentals. The advice is presented clearly, directly, and memorably. In such a way that, as I'm working a figure, I find myself remembering the lessons from the book, and making modifications as necessary. This pretty much always results in a visually improved figure. Can awkwardly rotated text be better presented? Are my color choices visually consistent, accessible, and balanced across a multipanel figure?

Finally, I wish I could fold chapter 24 "Use larger axis labels" into a paper airplane, and throw it towards most everyone presenting figures in talks.

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Dan Leahy

Super book

Reviewed in the United States on May 15, 2019

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Full disclosure: 3 years ago I became a colleague of Prof. Wilke at the University of Texas, and we have interacted occasionally since then although we are in different departments. I recently purchased this book because of interest in the topic and my respect for Prof. Wilke and have not been disappointed. I have taken the author's advice and have not read the book cover to cover but have been dipping into chapters of interest--but then I find myself hooked and reading further on. The author's straightforward presentations and clear delineation between good, bad, and matters of opinion are helpful and spot on. I am working on two scientific papers at the moment and found advice and discussions in the book that have improved figures in both papers--and I had previously prided myself on what I thought was a thoughtful approach to making figures. I left the book with my students, and now a regular feature of our weekly journal club is a Wilke-inspired critique of how the figures could have been better made to illustrate the main point. I strongly recommend this book to anyone whose work entails creating graphical illustrations to present complex data. It is full of thoughtful analysis, good advice, and great examples and will make your presentations and publications better.

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Severino R

An awesome resource for data visualisation

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 24, 2019

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I found this book to be an excellent resource for both educators and students. Wilke’s book provides you with a clear, straightforward and in-depth introduction to data visualisation, that can be used to learn about or to improve upon your current understanding of the subject.
What I like about this book is that the organisation of the content is divided into logical chapters, which provides a structure that’s easy to reference back to. The Illustrations provided are great as they help in explaining the concepts in the text well. I also like how the content is primarily focused on theory, practice and the aesthetics of good chart design, instead of how to build or code each visualisation.

Michael K. Smith

Excellent primer on creating effective data visualisations

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 6, 2020

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This book is very well organised and written. It presents rationale for different types of data visualisation organised by data type and what aspect of the data is to be visualised and also walks the reader through crafting effective data visualisations which will allow the salient point of the graphic to be quickly understood. Elements such as colour choice, effective use of labels, axes types, titles, etc. all help the reader to make better data graphics. Examples are given to illustrate how to avoid "bad" plots, and how to turn "ugly" plots into effective data visuals. I highly recommend this book as a complement to other books that concentrate on the mechanics of creating graphs.

Meh

Reviewed in Spain on October 6, 2019

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Un muy lindo libro a colores, pero lleno de ejemplos muy simples. Lo he devuelto.

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Samuel Beauvais

Uns des meilleurs livres de Data Visualisation

Reviewed in France on August 28, 2019

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Livre très visuel, avec des conseils très pragmatiques.
De nombreux graphiques illustrent parfaitement les concepts théoriques.

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Claudio Joao

Superbe

Reviewed in France on August 4, 2019

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Excelente

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Fundamentals of Data Visualization: A Primer on Making Informative and Compelling Figures 1st Edition

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