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Charts & Graphics: 10 excellent books

Charts and graphics are a key component of any business application. Visualizing numeric data let user understand evolution, spot trends and take corrective action when needed.

Here are 10 excellent books that can help you to produce great graphics for your applications and some hints to help you in choosing the best for your profile.

Stephen Few

The books from Stephen Few are a must for every BI and IT professional. They teach in simple words how to transform numeric data into crystal clear graphics the user can quickly and intuitively understand.

Few suggests which chart to use and which one to avoid in a pragmatic and effective way. Few also shows how to produce “clean” and understandable charts, suited for decision makers and not for an Hollywood movie audience.

“Now you see it” is Few's last book extremely rich in terms of guidelines and examples.

“Show me the numbers” also addresses presentation of tabular data, as important as graphs in terms of user interface.

“Information Dashboard Design” is fully devoted to dashboards. Dashboards constitute the visual user front-end of modern information system.

I put Fee's books at top position because, if your budget is limited, my suggestion is to limit your choice to Few's books only, in the order I listed.

Few is a passionate and sincere professional with a strong opinion that can generate polemics. His books demonstrate that pie charts and gauges (meter charts) are a poor choices and shall be avoided. Few gives actual evidence of that through practical examples sided by better alternatives. On the other side pie charts and gauges usually represent first wish of many management consultants.

Personally (and as a manager) I fully agree with Few and avoid pie charts and gauges for my own usage. I can't say the same for what we produce for the market.

The pie chart “abuse” is so strong that almost all operating system provide primitive functions to draw pie slices. I don't want our products be seen as “Don Quixote” to consultants that use them: whatever graph they want is fine as long as client signs the check!

In a future post I will present a reusable performance dashboard template that combines many Few's principles with an agile interaction. Stay tuned by subscribing my mailing list or RSS feed!

Edward Tufte

Tufte was a pioneer and his books are considered a reference by many other authors (including Few).

Tufte has written many visualization books. The two I have read are “Visual Explanations” and “Visual and Statistical Thinking: displays of evidence for making decisions”.

If you look for immediate advice on Analytics visualization those books have limited value. On the other side, if you to explore the basic principles of visualization, they will contribute precious insight and techniques.

Finally the first one (visual explanations) is a design masterpiece and its graphics, alone, fully worth its price.

 

Many examples for Inspiration

“Information Graphics” by Robert Harris contains a huge collection of different graphics. I think that almost whatever kind of graph you can think is there. If you are looking for a different way to present your data this is the book you need.

Another great and more modern source of inspiration is “Readings in Information Visualization - Using Vision to Think” edited by Card, Mackinlay and Scheinderman. Several authors present advanced and interactive visualization techniques with innovative applications.

You will find original papers and algorithms about treemaps, fisheye view, hyperbolic browsing and other techniques with many illustrative examples.

For the analytic mind

If your user has an analytic background “Visualizing Data” by William Cleveland is a practical approach to graph data for effective analysis. All what you need are XY graphics and a reasonable mathematical background.

The book walks through a set of graphic methods for displaying data with different number of variables. The methods are applied to practical examples and results are terrific!

 

Looking Ahead

Now, if you are adventurous, let's explore some advanced topic. Processing is a generic open source framework to “program images” and has been applied with success to data visualization. “Visualizing Data” by Ben Fry is a book about that.

Be aware you are entering an advanced field where graphics are defined through algorithms: you will need a reasonable mathematical and computational background to produce practical results but, if you want to visually differentiate your solution, this approach can definitely be your way.

And, if this is your case, you will probably also need “The Grammar of Graphics” by Leland Wilkinson.

I have intentionally left this book to conclude my list for its importance. I consider “The Grammar of Graphics” the Bible of graphics. It contains a systematic approach to generate almost whatever kind of graphic you need. From transforming data to aesthetic factors, from different coordinate systems to graphic guides. Again some mathematical background is needed.

Part II of the book explore practical considerations about space, time uncertainty and control that have tremendous impact on decision support graphics.

If your application shall provide flexible data visualization this book represents an invaluable resource to build your framework. You shall definitely read it!

Unhappily most graph libraries were not build from a strong foundation like the one presented in this book, but from ad-hoc solution to different graphic needs. As consequence API are usually not consistent, like for example basing different graph types on different data series. A promising alternative can be ggplot based on “The grammar of Graphics” and stacked on open source R system.

Are you a management consultant?

Would like to try or coach this technique with your clients, do you need any additional or technical detail? Please let me know! Component Bases Solutions has great interest in partnership with business consultants. We can help you automate your proposed solutions in a very short time. We can also help to increase your visibility through links from many management tools we make freely available on the Web. Please contact for more detail.

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Posted at 12:00AM Jan 14, 2010 by admin in General  |  Comments[6]