Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 11-15 of 31
 Guidelines for helpful book reviews December 17, 2007
Stephen C. Few (Berkeley, CA United States)
19 out of 22 found this review helpful
This is not a review of "Show Me the Numbers." I wrote this book, so I can hardly review it objectively. My purpose here is to write a review of reviews, or more accurately stated, to suggest some guidelines for writing helpful reviews. I decided to do this, because, as an author, it is painful to occasionally read reviews of books that are either uninformed or based on expectations that have nothing to do with the book.
Here are two guidelines that I believe every book reviewer should take to heart.
Guideline #1: Don't review a book that you haven't actually read.
I once had a MBA student of mine write a scathing review of one of my books--a book he had never even seen--because I gave him a "B" grade rather than the "A" he wanted on an assignment. People read reviews to learn about a book. If you haven't read the book, you're not qualified to tell them anything useful, and you're certainly not qualified to judge its merits. Simply knowing that you don't share the author's point of view doesn't give you the right to criticize the book.
Guideline #2: Judge the merits of a book by how well it achieves what it set out to achieve.
If the author claims to do something that the book fails to do, or does it but does so poorly, it deserves low marks. If it fulfills its stated intentions and does so well, it deserves high marks. If you wanted something different from the book's stated purpose, it isn't the author's fault that you didn't get what you wanted.
If you follow these two simple and honorable guidelines and express yourself clearly, you will provide other potential readers with helpful information. If you fail to follow these guidelines, you will not only serve other readers poorly, you might also erroneously discredit a book that someone labored over with great care.
In the spirit of these guidelines, let me say about the book "Show Me the Numbers" what I stated clearly in the book itself. This book was written primarily for everyday people with little or no statistical training who wish to present quantitative information clearly, accurately, and compellingly. It is a comprehensive and practical guide for table and graph design that was written especially to address the needs of this audience in a way that is accessible to this audience. Although many statisticians use this book to improve their ability to present data to non-statisticians, it is not intended as a guide to the advanced graphical displays that statisticians sometimes need. This book is also software agnostic--meaning that the principles and practices that I teach in it can be applied to almost any software that produces tables and graphs. As such, it is not a "how to" guide for creating graphs using a particular software product, such as Microsoft Excel. It can certainly teach you how to use the charting functionality of Excel more effectively, but it does so by teaching simple design principles and practices, not by telling you where to find particular graphing functions that might be hiding somewhere in Excel's menus and dialog boxes.
You will find that "Show Me the Numbers" has only received low ratings from Amazon reviewers who wanted a different book; one that was written for a different audience and purpose. Everyone who has actually read it and judged its merits based on how well it achieves what I set out to do, as clearly described in the book and its promotional materials, has given it high marks for the useful, well-expressed information that it provides.
Take care,
Stephen Few
 Somewhat helpful December 14, 2007
K. Hathaway (Portland, Maine)
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
Few applies the Tufte principles, but with less brilliance. Many of his examples are useful - but the book lacks examples of graphical sophistication. The book may help those looking to simplify the business-class Excel experience - but anyone involved with serious scientific data graphics need to look elsewhere. Consider William Cleveland.
 don't get both books September 22, 2007
Paul Mclachlan (Seattle, WA USA)
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
I recommend not buying both of the Few books - there's what seems to be quite a bit of overlapping content between them -- pick the one book that is closer to what you're working on and just get that one, it'll cover what you need.
There are some interesting concepts in here - if you read his blog you'll have a really good idea for what you're getting.
http://www.perceptualedge.com/
Great Book for Business July 12, 2007
Leonard D. Stimley (Ph.D.)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Show Me the Numbers provides the practical and useful information needed to creat tables and graphs to effectively tell your quantitative story. Through numerous examples and illustrations, Stephen Few points out the good, the bad, and the just plain ugly ways that quantitative data can be presented. Numbers are important to any business. This book provides the reader with the tools needed to fluently communicate using the language of numbers.
Not a Great Advance May 13, 2007
Lynn Cherny (Waltham, MA)
11 out of 14 found this review helpful
This is a very basic overview of easy descriptive statistics, combined with some Tufte-esque notes on graph display, but for the more sophisticated reader on metrics/data/stats, this is not a real keeper. About 20% of it was new or thought-provoking, so if you're already well-read on this topic, don't get this one.
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