The 8 Best Books that will make you a Data Visualization Expert
DashboardWorx
Data analytics consulting. Building an advanced data analytics toolkit for Tableau and PowerBI users.
Data visualization has taken the world by storm with its beautiful and interactive designs that portray significant bits of information in a finite space. It has revolutionized the way data analysis works by introducing a diverse range of techniques that can be understood by the human brain faster and much more efficiently. It is no surprise, thus, that many books have been written on such a ground-breaking process.
This blog will tell you about the eight best books on data visualization that have been collated from different generations, styles, and purposes. Whether you are a Visualisation expert wanting to hone your skills or a Data Visualisation enthusiast who is just stepping foot into the stream, these books are of immense use for all.
?BOOKS ON DATA VISUALISATION
These are the books we will be reading about in this article:
Let us now dive into the details of these books -
?Available on Amazon, this book by Edward Tufte goes down in history as a classic. It has about 250 beautiful illustrations that complement the theoretical aspects of design in data graphics, charts, and tables. Readers get a better understanding of aspects like the data-ink ratio, time-series, multivariate designs, etc., in this book.
It also has a newer edition that is colorized and corrected as per the 17 printings of the first edition.
?The author brings his practical experience as a cartographer to throw light on the theoretical aspects of information design. Originally published in 1967 in French, the book is segmented into two parts.
?Part One is one of its kind as it focuses on the principles of graphic communication. Part Two of the book emphasizes the author’s theory and other graphic techniques using over 1,000 visuals based on shape, orientation, color, texture, volume, and size.
The author presents a unique take on data visualization in this excellent book. Through this book, he tells all readers about how one can study human perception, cognition, and attention to make data visualization designs more profitable.
The author aims to guide young designers to focus on their audience’s thinking process and use those insights to maximize their impact. It has hundreds of examples and colorful diagrams.
?It is the first book that termed data visualization a ‘functional art’ rather than fine art, which sets the book apart from all the others in the genre. The book teaches its readers how visual elements such as colors and text fonts can be made more beautiful and much more informative.
It is also available on a DVD-ROM with over 90 minutes of video lessons about how data designs influence the human brain and how this phenomenon can be used to designers’ advantage.
The author dives right to the very basics in this book to guide those who aspire to create and publish their visualizations on the web, especially novices in the field. The handbook is easy to read as it has a step-by-step explanation of the entire process and includes fundamental concepts of D3, a JavaScript library, and HTML, CSS, and SVG basics.
This book has been rightfully credited as the first complete data visualization handbook. Published by the Oxford Press, it has an impressive set of 3,000 illustrations that serve as perfect examples of a diverse range of techniques to visualize data in an attractive, informative, and effective manner.
It is very well indexed and can be used by people for various things such as scientific journals, reports, newspapers, or web designs.
?The core of this book is based on time-oriented data. The authors have successfully been able to draw the readers’ attention to the fact that the unique features of time call for particular data visualization techniques to be impactful. The book guides everybody to answer these three questions, which form separate chapters:
what is being visualized (data);
why something is visualized (user tasks); and,
how it is presented (visual representation).
The author here talks about the two most visible and effective data visualization techniques in this book: tables and graphs. They’re most widely used and easy to understand. The book has various tips, suggested practices and describes the common mistakes to avoid making ‘ordinary’ tables and charts superlative.
The book theoretically highlights how to use such commonplace techniques truthfully to present quantitative business information in the best possible way.
All of these books have served as significant milestones in the field of data visualization. The learnings from these texts have been the guiding principles of the toolkit pioneered by Dashboard Worx. The toolkit provides ready-to-use templates that just require you to input the data via Tableau to give you results that exceed your expectations.
We draw inspiration from such books and present to you the best version of our product based on its fundamental lessons. Download the toolkit to be pleasantly surprised today!