Visualizing Data

Very helpful and the production of figures for publication

This book builds on "The elements of graphing data". Technology has moved on a long way since these books were written. However, improvements in presentation technology do not necessarily lead to the presentation of data in a way that provide insight. The key to getting the most from your data visualisations is understanding the contents of these two volumes not in Excel's pretty graphing tools. Obviously it is easier to bang out a pretty graph in Excel, than to digest all the information in these two volumes, but you get what you pay for.

A classic. Definitely not dated. Sometimes you read a modern book and some basic methods are taken for granted. Cleveland's and Tukey's book help make sense of it all.

This is a fabulous book for anyone truly serious about graphic display of information in a statistically meaningful way. It's a tough read but well worth the effort!

This book explains book learned details in a very exciting way.

First and foremost, this book has a definite audience: people who need to produce graphs for somewhat sophisticated audiences. This is not a book about producing graphs for mass marketing or other flashy arenas. While this point is implicit throughout the book, it is not often stated explicitly.The biggest strength of this book, and what makes it worth the purchase, is Cleveland's discussion about the relationship between graphing and visual processing. We've all seen a thousand pie charts, for example, but it turns out that people are not good at visually processing pie charts. The way we process visually has implications for everything from line graph construction to color choices to deciding how to code data on XY scatter plots. Although this information does exist in other places, Cleveland brings it together concisely here. Some of the discussion can get a bit technical, however, so be warned.This is a great first book to read to learn more about how to construct graphs, and it has enough references to point you to other sources if you feel you need more. I myself have purchased several other books about the visual representation of data (including Cleveland's other book " The Elements of Graphing Data "), but this is where I started, and the information in this book has enriched my understanding of those other books immeasurably.

So this is a great book, an update of Clevelands The Elements of Graphing Data (which is also great). It is not a guide to making pretty infographics, rather it is a guide to how to making effective and clear visualization for exploratory data analysis. So the book is a bit pricey, but (and this doesn't really show in the pictures on amazon) the book binding and printing is of great quality + the cover is silver (not gray, as it looks in the pictures).

Behaviour elucidation is done amazingly well. This book is even more powerful than Cleveland's "Elements of Graphing Data". Key words for what you achieve: incisive, powerful, salient behaviour eludidation. The principles of graphical perception from "Elements" are great (and themselves powerful) but this book invents and emphasizes yet more incisive visualizations. These new visualizations involve considerable computation IN SUPPORT OF CONSTRUCTING the graphs. But the GRAPHS -- and the behaviours they make manifest/salient -- are the point. As in "Elements", Cleveland is not just about the techniques as if they were rote procedure; he helps you build perspective too. This book, in a very real sense, (even explicitly so stated by Cleveland himself) is an alternative paradigm to the pervasive statistical inference paradigm. No wonder, then, that another reviewer (a Statistics student) learned so much he had never even seen before. Boy was "Visualizing" useful for a project I had on univariate data in multiple categorical groups (folding durability; 6 groups of data); Chapter 2 of "Visualizing" TRULY had me seeing things I NEVER would've otherwise. The book also guides you in the computations you need to get to the visualizations.

Interesting book that takes care to lay things out simply. A lot of care taken over the look and feel of the book.

Excellent book if you want to learn about statistical graphing of data. Cleveland pioneered rigorous scientific approach to visualization, and this book is a classical. Glad to have acquired a copy.