Deborah F. Swayne

This is definitely not an introductory tutorial or a how-to book on data visualization. The authors are the developers of the wonderful GGobi visualization system and its R integration and they have put lots of documentation online to which they don't hesitate to refer in many parts of the book. That means you have to have some background in R programming, statistical terminology, principal component analysis, etc.

The main strength of the book is providing very good examples depicting how show more dynamic graphics based analyses can help analytical methods. I especially consider the chapters on supervised classification and clustering very well designed. Many critical aspects are stressed and the importance of "looking at data before diving into support vector machines, linear discrminant analysis, decision trees and self-organizing maps" is shown from different perspectives (pun intended ;-)

If you are serious about data visualization, data mining and statistics then this book *along* with the accompanying website will be a very good guide. The exercises at the end of each chapter will also provide challenges as well as valuable insights. show less