The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Since nobody has mentioned it yet, for charts and graphs there's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte: https://amazon.com/Visual-Display-Quantitative-Information/d... (https://amazon.com/Visual-Display-Quantitative-Information/dp/0961392142/)

Metamathematics by Kleene. On Lisp by Graham. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Tufte.

definitely second Tufte, lots of good info on consolidation and creating coherent charts and maps from large datasets

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information: Edward R. Tufte Ways to Connect: On Interface and Product Design, Ryan Singer Something on color theory Design language books (Bauhaus, etc) The entire Google design team has quite a few open resources: https://material.io/design/ and https://design.google

Goedel, Escher, Bach -- If you're reading this page you will dig this book. Guns, Germs, and Steel -- how circumstance drove civilizations. Fun storytelling even if it's a bit too "just-so". definitely trains you to look at any situation and seek it's origins with less initial judgement. The Visual Display of Quantitive Information -- gets at the essence of communication and medium. more than it seems! The Alchemy of Finance -- "reflexivity", but if you're also interested in Soros or some finance storytelling it's worth it. The Selfish Gene -- as everyone else has said. The Prize -- the history of oil. huh? yeah. Likely to change how you look at the history of technology, government, power, the saudis, and geopolitics.

Godel Escher Bach is fairly bible-ish if you ask me Another set of books I consider to be "one" bible are Edward Tufte's (1) The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, (2) Envisioning Information, (3) Visual Explanations and (4) Beautiful Evidence.

1. The Bible. It encourages me to live in a way that's also good for others, especially when I'm feeling selfish and cynical, and it teaches me how to interact with them in a healthy way (e.g. the book of Proverbs). 2. The Elements of Style. I always enjoyed writing, but at first school taught me to write in a flowery, longwinded way. This was the book that cracked the code for me to good writing. It dispelled a lot of self-serving and ultimately self-defeating habits and paved the way to clean, helpful English. When I finally got into programming in my late twenties, I found that many of the same principles make good code. 3. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. This is like the Elements of Style but for graphs. Again, it encouraged me to cut through the hype and deliver the content as clearly and succinctly as possible --- to serve the reader, not stroke my ego.

Have you checked out the handful of books listed on the YCombinator "Startup Library" page (http://ycombinator.com/lib.html)?: Dale Carnegie: How to Win Friends and Influence People Edward Tufte: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information Paul Graham: Hackers and Painters Jessica Livingston: Founders at Work

Is Beautiful Evidence good? VDQA is an all-time favorite of mine, and I've even paid to see him talk live about this stuff, but I've found his books got fuzzier and increasingly subjective over time, so that I really don't even remember what Visual Explanations was trying to say anymore.

For pure data visualization, Tufte is absolutely the brilliant and helps you avoid a whole raft of bad behavior that leads to sloppy, hard to understand graphics. I can't second your suggestion enough. I would add that his one day course is a great way to get started reading his books (especially if you can get your employer to pay for it). He's a great speaker and you get all the books as part of the course. I wish all the makers of charting libraries, toolkits, and data analysis software were more familiar with his work. It would save us from some truly awful junk. One area where I disagree with him frequently is when he strays from data visualization into user interface design. In general, I find his user interface preferences result in UI's that are too cluttered. One of his main rules is that data presentations should be very dense. However, I disagree that this approach works as well for user interfaces as it does when visualizing data. If you look at his web site (http://www.edwardtufte.com/) you can see his UI philosophy on display. I find Don Norman to be much better in this area than Tufte.

Yes, the books are excellent, great reads, though the first one as you say is the essential one. Once you read these, you will start seeing 'Data Ducks' everywhere! I speak from experience.

> Edward Tufte's book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is a monumental book. Agreed, its absolutely excellent. Thanks to Y Combinator for listing it in the book list. > Additionally, if I were you, I'd stay way from statistical approaches to displaying information... Not agreed. In my opinion you might have missed what I felt was a main point of that book: Always learn the appropriate statistics required to understand the data, choose a correct visualization method to communicate those statistics effectively, and once you've understood it fully, confirmed the results, and removed all the cruft, then publish it.

Tufte is great, but he's extremely heavy and a bit dated. He is about 80% brilliant 20% completely missing the point. It's very strange. If you are looking for a smaller book I've found the WSJ Guide to Information Graphics by Dona Wong to be pretty decent and pretty straight forward, and it's about 100 pages. It's not too focused on finance either, although that's what I got it for (I do front end development for financial analysis company - lots of charting). http://www.amazon.com/Street-Journal-Guide-Information-Graph... (http://www.amazon.com/Street-Journal-Guide-Information-Graphics/dp/0393072959)

The Tufte books are brilliant. For dynamic charts, his first book (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information) is the most relevant, it covers the theory - how to tell a good representation from a bad one - and the basics. Readings in Information Visualization ( http://www.amazon.co.uk/Readings-Information-Visualization-I... (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Readings-Information-Visualization-Interactive-Technologies/dp/1558605339/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271259347&sr=8-1) ) is a collection of papers covering a wide range of techniques for a wide range of tasks. Apart from that, it's mostly a matter of picking up interesting ideas wherever you find them. flowingdata.com is nice, same with http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/

Edward Tufte's book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is a monumental book. He writes not about how to make your graphs look pretty, but how to display vast quantities of data and distill them down into useful graphics that communicate themselves effectively. He provides examples of good and bad graphs, but more importantly, explains what exactly it is that makes those examples good and bad, and further generalizes it so you understand how to make good visualizations. If you don't want to shell out the money for it, it's probably at your library (remember those?). Additionally, if I were you, I'd stay way from statistical approaches to displaying information unless you have some background or are willing to learn about it -- it tends to be highly technical and is probably too complex for what you're trying to do. Basic stats might help you, but not as much as Tufte will.

Visualizing Data is a good choice, but I would also suggest you note the recent string of critiques of content-free visualization on flowingdata and start out with Tufte if you are new to the field.

I've read The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Tufte, and I think it would benefit you even though you are not talking about manually generating charts. For example, he talks about how it's easy to be misleading with a chart based on how you calibrate the axes, which is something you'd still need to do even with dynamically generated visualizations.

Tufte books are awesome, but overkill for website UI.

The Evolution of Cooperation - Robert Axelrod Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clark Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace The Informant - Kurt Eichenwald The Visual Display of Quantitative Information - Edward Tufte Liar's Poker - Michael Lewis

I had long pined to read Tufte's The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, but couldn't convince myself to spend the money; when I arrived at university, I immediately found a copy, and greatly appreciated it (not to say I agreed with every point). I thence read Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and found it fascinating--for anyone who's ever taken an interest in typography, visualization, or the theory of communication, it's an excellent read. Even if none of that interests you, you'd still benefit from the book: it shows you how to think analytically about human factors, which is a relatively rare discipline.