Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 16-20 of 113
 Required reading, yet fun! February 10, 2009
Sophie Lagace (Eureka, CA)
This gorgeous, entertaining, and fantastically helpful book needs to be required reading for all students and practitioners of science and engineering. Read it! Never again will you dare concoct an illegible chart or a nonsensical table, and you will learn about many other techniques for usefully displaying information.
Read This Tufte First December 28, 2008
Keith McCormick (North Carolina, USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I have attended one of the author's talks (easy to find on the web), and have all four books. One criticism of Tufte is that it is not obvious how to go about doing many of the graphics in his books. They are carefully crafted by individuals with great skill and expensive software. The fourth book, Beautiful Evidence, might leaving you scratching you head as to how to use the information in preparation for your next business presentation. He deserves his reputation, however. The books are beautiful, and his ideas have great merit. If you want an introduction to Tufte that gives you a chance of putting the advice into practice at work, you must read this one first. To go for the most recent, would be a mistake for most readers. If you become a convert, the other three are also excellent, but offer less practical application for the everyday business person. (For instance, I am a statistician and data miner, not a graphic designer).
The second book is Envisioning Information, and the third is The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition. Beware the inexpensive paperbacks - they are excepts from the hardcovers. Good content, but potentially redundant.
Although it is not a book for everyone, there is a very interesting discussion (albeit short) of Minard's Napoleon's march chart (made famous by Tufte) in The Grammar of Graphics (Statistics and Computing).
Interesting and enjoyable December 7, 2008
User313 (England, UK)
Stimulates the visualisation of information with illustrations on every page and easy to read text. Provides many helpful ideas, as well as some `do and don't's. Some overlap with the other book (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information / Envisioning Information).
 Great ! November 24, 2008
Thomas Reneau (Seoul, Korea)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book is great. It has a lot of useful insights. However I was expecting something more practical... Maybe it's not a guide but a book with some nice historical data and references. Superb graphs and pictures.
Yes I would recommend you to buy it .
Life Changing and Beautiful November 6, 2008
Michael M. Danziger (Venice, CA/Jerusalem, Israel)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
It is rare that a supposedly technical book really changes a reader's life. I can say, though, that after reading Tufte's books, my life is not the same. The complaints of the detracting reviewers are baseless if you understand the nature of this book. This book is the groundworks of a theory of seeing, of communicating through images. It is by no means a new theory. Throughout human history man has communicated through history. But Tufte shows with unparalleled visual eloquence what makes one image successfully communicate while another fails.
After reading this book, I have never looked at printed matter in the same way again. Not only that, through his breadth of examples and the depth of his analysis, the reader is made to realize that visual information/visual communication are at the heart of our human identity. Tufte's definition of successful display and its inherent subtlety are so deeply human that they can be carried over to general rhetoric and aesthetics if not farther.
No, he won't do your homework for you. He won't supply you with handy templates for making projects look snappier. Expecting that is like expecting a philosophy book to think for you. This work (I refer to all of his books--they really are one unit together) is certainly one of the great accomplishments of the last twenty years.
Showing reviews 16-20 of 113
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