Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics

"Nathan Yau is a statistician, with a PhD from UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) like me, although our time there did not coincide. He worked with Mark Hansen, who is an expert in data visualization and design thinking. Yau has a long history of thinking carefully about data visualization through his blog ‘ Flowing Data ’. He’s written a lot about how to present data. There are different times during a typical analysis where you’ll want to visualize your data: the main ones are during the early stages when you’re exploring the data, and in the later stages when you’re presenting your findings. This book is about how best to present data to other people, what are the tools that you can use, and the types of visualizations that you can make. He’s an incredible thinker in this area, very meticulous and careful. Some of the examples he presents on his website are really well-designed and thought out. And this book is a great representation of the incredible work he’s doing. One thing that you can learn from it is a process for thinking through what you’re doing, and meticulously making sure that your visualizations have the impact that you want them to have. It is lacking in many cases, but I think there’s a reason for that: it’s not that easy to teach it. It’s difficult to automate. You have to actually look at what’s been done and decide for yourself what’s good or bad about it, but there’s no easy formula for doing that. On the other hand, when you’re developing machine-learning algorithms, there’s fairly predictable process. For visualizations, we often present people with various tools that they can use, but it’s a more amorphous process in terms of teaching it."