Alberto Cairo

I was already of the big fan of The Functional Art, Alberto Cairo's previous book, and this one is just as good, i.e., excellent. On top of it, it's a gorgeous book, with a ton of examples illustrating all the principles of data visualization Cairo explains, all in glorious colors, demonstrating the power of data visualization. Cairo weaves in some very mild statistical content in there (mostly descriptive stuff). But overall, the book is mostly about using visualization appropriate for the show more data, what one wants to communicate, in the most effective way. On top of it, Cairo's writing style is crystal clear, friendly, and humble, which makes this book appropriate for any audience.

This book will be my main text for the dataviz section of my undergraduate curriculum on data science.

Highly recommended. Can't wait for the next one. show less

This may be coming in low for me because I already have some background in the area, and had high expectations.

I wasn't expecting material on stats or manipulation of data, or scientific method, but a good chunk of time is spent on it. What I hoped to learn was a more systematic way of thinking about visualization and going deeper there. This book basically gives you an intro to everything you need to go from zero to visualizing data (conceptually and mathematically, not technically). I show more like the message of the book (let the data tell the story, not your narrative) and it does provide some of what I was looking for. (The hierarchy of visualization and some other general principles it outlined were all good) however I felt most of the content was intro stuff. I could also have completely missed the point, or come from such a different place I wasn't prepared to absorb the value. show less

In this book, Cairo explains how good charts are constructed and how bad ones lie, whether through distorting the data, presenting too much or too little, or just being badly designed in the first place. Knowing how to interpret charts, and particularly to visit and question the sources of the data powering the chart, is crucial to being well informed in our visual-heavy society.

Overall, I enjoyed this book. The author draws on a variety of sources and explains well how to read various types show more of charts, as well as what exactly is wrong with the poorly designed charts. He also recommends other books that will broaden the reader’s understanding of statistics. This is worth picking up. show less

As always, with Alberto Cairo, you get an entertaining, insightful, clearly-written book on the basics of data visualization, and the pitfalls that readers can encounter with charts. The stated goal is to develop the reader's graphical literary or graphicacy (a close cousin to numerical literacy and information literacy). In that goal, I would argue that book is very successful. It can be put in the hands of anyone as it is very accessible, with a lot of both serious and fun examples. In the show more era of fake news and distortions, it is a welcome antidote.
Which gets to my one source of irritation: Cairo's repeated assertion of his political moderation, sometimes couples with both-sides-do-it-ism. At this point in time, it is rather clear that one side has abandoned reason, logic, and basic truth-telling. This is not a case of both sides do it. And yes, we all tend to prefer charts that tell us reality is how we see it and supports our interpretation. But again, this framework does not apply to our current times of one side lying to a far worse extent, and isolating itself from anything outside Fox News.
As I said, this was my one source of irritation.
On a slightly different note: Cairo had a different publisher than for the Functional Art and The Truthful Art, and both books had better production, I thought, with softer paper and full color charts. That is not the case here. The color palette is much more limited, which is a shame when you want to show a significant number of charts.
That being said, again, a really great introductory book to the art and science of data visualization. show less