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Summary: It Will Change Your Thinking
Review: Are you put to sleep by briefings on a regular basis? Do they become more colorful and simplified as the intended audience rises in your company hirearchy? Do you feel that you are being talked down to by a lot of fluff that could be condensed by a factor of say, a million? If your answers are "yes," but you cannot provide a good alternative, then this is the book for you. It changes the way you look at data. Through numerous examples, Tufte demonstrates how to rearrange and simplify tabulated lists, schedules, graphs, diagrams and maps in a way that elegantly reveals otherwise hidden relationships and patterns. I have applied his techniques to my own briefings as well as to vacation itineraries, meeting notes, and to do lists. But be forewarned. I have touted this book to my peers and managers and of the four people who have read the book none have had the epiphany I experienced. This book may be only for those who are fed up enough to change.
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Summary: I rescued this book from a trash can!
Review: True. One boss replaced another and cleared the "old junk" from the office bookshelves. I picked this gem up and out of a trash can, hurried to my office, and did a little dance with the book clutched to my chest!In the past eight years, I have read and re-read this book more times than I can remember - always amazed at its clarity and always learning something new. I've used the cut-thru-the-crap ideas it holds to get my point across in business, research, education, manufacturing, and web design. Anytime somebody tells me I have a knack for simplifying complicated ideas I smile and think of this book. IT'S GREAT! Oh, and the new boss? He's gone.
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Summary: Will change the way you think -- a masterpiece
Review: The title makes this sound like a specialist monograph. it is not; it will change the way you think about presenting informnation and ideas. If that is part of your life -- teacher, academic, manager, web site developer -- this book will open your eyes. The best part of the book is all the wonderful imaginative examples Tufte quotes. He draws some general conclusions from some examples, which is useful, but mostly he just looks at what works, and contrasts with what doesn't. Tufte's next twoo books are also excellent, but this one is the best -- simply a msterpiece
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Summary: How to Create Clear Decisions from Clear Data
Review: Mr. Tufte recently gave a full day seminar on the concepts he expounds in his three books (he is working on a fourth), which I was able to attend. This, his first book, is really the foundation for understanding the principles he puts forth in the next two, and present a clear template on how to do the best possible job when presenting data visually. This book explains how to clearly and elegantly design data for presentation in order to maximize its efficiency. While there are several fields where this is directly applicable, web design, finance and any other area requiring significant quantiative analysis, it is difficult to envision any field which would not benefit from Mr. Tufte's very insightful and educational opinions. This book is divided into two parts, a history and guide to "Graphical Practice" and a section describing the "Theory of Data Graphics." In the first, the author describes what makes for good visual data and outlines the history of the visual presentation of data. In the second part the author discusses many specific techniques for evaluating the efficiency of graphics and methods for ensuring that graphics are created in an intelligent and thoughtful manner. The whole of the book is full of wonderful historical examples of good and bad graphics. Every page has a graphic, and every graphic has been thoughtfully chosen and tells a wonderful story. If you were to purchase this book and merely look at the charts and figures it would be a worthwhile purchase, if you take the time to read the back up text the book truly is a masterpiece. The author does an exceptional job of clearly presenting his points at the conclusion of the chapters and provides a large number of well selected examples of his points. Mr. Tufte's theories are clear, (1) charts are not just a way of livening up 'boring' data, (2) no chart can overcome poor content, (3) charts should contain as much relevant data as possible, and (4) charts should not be livenend up with 'chartjunk' just for the sake of displaying nifty graphics capabilities. This is an excellent book, which is well thought out and clearly illustrates the author's point - but given the subject matter, that is exactly what you should expect.
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Summary: Pure Joy
Review: Rarely can you claim a book to be so wonderful, so beautiful and so perfect. Even more rarely can such a description be placed on a book of a technical subject such as we see here. The Visual Display Of Quantitative Information is fewer than 200 pages and yet you'll get so much out of it. Tufte writes with an amazing precision; no word is superfluous. You can sense Tufte's commitment to his work; his passion and quality. The book is crafted with the design principles he set forth. It's a stunning masterpiece and you'll savor every word.
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Summary: good, but expensive
Review: The book is good, the contents is beautiful. This is a quality book, and obviously you have to pay the price for that. Many people should read this book, especially if involved in web stuff, it would make the web better.
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Summary: Some good, some bad
Review: The review of good and bad designs is useful. But Tufte's "theory" of good design seems to boil down to one thing only: use less ink. Using this single-minded technique, he "improves" several designs, which look worse to me, not better. Similarly with his new design ideas, most of which didn't look like improvements over existing ideas.
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Summary: eloquent text on graphical displays
Review: This was the first of three books written by Tufte on graphical displays. This book has been heralded by famous statisticians and average readers as an eloquent description of the how to and how not to make graphs. Now in its sixteenth printing, this is still a classic and the pictures tell the story along with the prose.
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Summary: Incredible book
Review: Incredibly revealing, educational and important book. The first place to start, and "a must read" for anyone who uses graphics to display statistics and for anyone who must analyze and/or interpret such graphics. Tufte truly has something important to say.
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Summary: Extremely well researched book on what makes good design.
Review: You know what's so good about this book? The research, that's what. In showing both good and bad graphic design, Tufte has examples from as far back as 1686, and many examples from the 18th,19th & 20th centuries and from many different countries. Good graphic design, he argues, reveals the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space. Interestingly, some of the best examples of this come from the pre-computer era, when graphics had to be drawn by hand (and therefore more thought had to go into their design, rather than the author just calling up the Bar Graph template on the desktop.) For example, that picture you can see on the front cover of the book is actually a train timetable that packs a whole list of arrivals and departures at many different stations into a single little picture. A better example (and the "best statistical graphic ever drawn") shows Napoleon's route through Europe. It shows a) the map b) where he went c) how many people were in his army at each point and d) the temperature on the way back that killed off his army. At a glance you can see the factors that led to his army losing. AND it was drawn by hand in 1885 and is little more than a line drawing! He also gives examples of really bad design, (including "the worst graphic ever to make it to print"), and shows what makes it so bad. His examples prove that information-less, counter-intuitive graphics can still look dazzlingly pretty, even though they're useless. In some examples, he shows how small changes can make the difference between an awful graphic and a really good one. My favourite example of this is how he drew the inter-quartile ranges on the x and y axes of a scatterplot, thus adding more information to the graphic without cluttering it up. In summary, there's a lot more to good graphic design than being an Adobe guru. Reading this book made me feel like a more discerning viewer of graphics!
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