Thursday, March 26, 2020

Fourth edition of a classic —plus my favorite visualization books

This morning I replied to a post in Linkedin asking for favorite books about data visualization. You can see my answer below, in case you're curious.

I googled Colin Ware's Information Visualization: Perception for Design, to add a link to it, and discovered that its fourth edition is being released tomorrow, March 27, at least on Amazon. What a coincidence! I just ordered it.

I have many favorite books, but here's my answer to the Linkedin post:

I try to read all books about visualization that I find, so I have many favorites. 
Because it was so illuminating to me more than a decade ago, I love the 1st edition of Thematic Cartography and Visualization by Terry Slocum. Used copies are $7-8 these days, which is great. 
Colin Ware's Information Visualization: Perception for Design, is an absolute classic. It's in its 4th edition already. 
Isabel Meirelles' Design for Information brings the perspective of a visual designer.
Tamara Munzner's Visualization Analysis and Design
For business graphics, Stephen Few's Show Me the Numbers
 Finally, William Cleveland's pair The Elements of Graphing Data and Visualizing Data, which deserve much more popularity than they have. 
Oh, and any book by Howard Wainer. He has many, compiling his articles. 
I could go on an on. There's a lot of good stuff out there these days. We're lucky.