John Murphy said
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.
Vincent Elschot said
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.
Marcin Kasperski said
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.
Jerome Cukier said
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 [..]
Jeffrey K. Tyzzer said
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 chapter one thoroughly to ensure that this book is right for you.
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