I understand that these topics are well outside the scope of this book, but I think a suggested reading page would be very helpful for those of us with out a technical background.

I pointed this out on his blog, and was surprised to find my comment almost immediately deleted. For someone who is so critical of the software that he reviews, he seems to be unable or unwilling to take any criticism of his own work.

i should point out that i didn’t mean “textbook” as a negative. the writing style is easy to read. Just the format and the amount of information in the book is textbook-like, which could of course be good thing.

I found myself relaxing while reading it. Often I would flip back-n-forth between pages, studying examples to textual explanations, much like I do when reading a woodworking article. If a re-read a section, I did so, not out of confusion, but out of gaining insight — i..e., “that is so cool!”.

The graphs (figures) on pages 172-175 and page 234 are worth the price of the book — they illustrate how the visualization of data will directly influence your (lack of) undertanding and assumptions about the data.

To quote Few, “the business intelligence industry has largely ignored the fact that intelligence resides in human beings, and that information only becomes valuable when it is understood, not just when it’s made available.” (pg 3). When I read this sentence, I actually felt emotionally charged, especially the part about “intelligence resides in human beings.”

He ran the class as a 2 day workshop across 2 weekends. Homework was due before class and there were group exercises in class that applied some of the topics from the lecture and readings.

thanks for your review. I have degree in Management Information Systems and am planning to take a Master in Interactive Multimedia, where I’ll have a course in Data Visualization. I think this sounds like a good book for me to get into visualization.