Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 16-20 of 31
 Excellent Book April 12, 2007
Paresh Shah
2 out of 6 found this review helpful
This is a great book which clearly elucidates design principles. The fact that all the graphs explained are created in Excel also makes the book more practicable.
Good graph/table, insightful techniques, clumsy writing January 27, 2007
Ng Hon Ming (Hong Kong)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
The book's content is good and useful for the analyst who needs to present numbers concisely and clearly, making people understand at the first sight.
However, the writing of the book is a bit clumsy. The book progresses slowly.This book makes its point only at the middle of the book. I was expecting the book went straight to the point to share about the techniques of presenting numbers effectively at the very front pages.
 The summaries make it worthwhile August 17, 2006
Bart Denturck (Belgium)
42 out of 44 found this review helpful
I bought and read the books of Tufte and Cleveland (The elements of graphing data). Tufte is pushing things too far, there are certain expectation people have about what they want to see in a graph, but his analysis of the "lie factor" is great and it's a beautiful book. Clevelands book is becoming outdated; the use of colours is really helpful and other than two glued-in pages he does not mention it at all. The analysis is cristal clear and it's full of good and bad examples. Someone ought to rework it, it's invaluable to me.
The recommendation that Few makes in his book are worth buying it and you can read this book in a day, just skip the long explanations. Its indeed long and a somewhat simple, leaving the impression that the content is rather thin, but if anyone presenting data would stick to these simple rules, presentations would make a major step forward in clarity.
My conclusion:
- if you are a scientist, go for Cleveland.
- If have been a scientist and became a "manager" buy Few.
- If you are active in politics or other domains that communicate to the large public, Tufte will tell you how to tell the truth :-)
One more thing: pie charts are there to stay, no matter how hard we fight them and how many authors hate them and break them down with good arguments. One cannot turn back the clock, there is something like fashion in the way we present data.
 Not Very Practical January 26, 2006
Japhy (NYC)
108 out of 128 found this review helpful
I work in finance and create many charts and graphs. I figured a book like this would help me to design them better. I was really looking for a practical guide rather than a long, rambling academic textbook, but that's how this book reads.
It seems aimed at college underclassmen rather than business professionals. Few spends page after page discussing the most basic mathematical concepts and things that you simply don't need to know in order to create a graph. For example, there is an entire chapter on basic statistics such as how to calculate a mean, median and mode. There is also a lengthy discussion of how the human eye works.
As I went through the book I found myself thinking: "Wow, Few has so little to say about tables and graphs that he needs all of this filler material to make this seem like a real book!"
There are some valuable chapters at the end of the book, but it takes a lot of patience to get there.
The page format is also really annoying and too textbook-like. It is a really wide book with citations (90% of which seemed to be from Tufte) in the wide margins.
I give this review one star for the 15 or so pages worth of good advice it contains. Unfortunately that wasn't enough content to warrant an entire textbook If you're a business professional looking for something you can use, this book is VASTLY overpriced and oversized.
My final comment is on the cover: An eye. A Brain. A sun. Bars coming out of each. It says very little to me, and that seemed to be the theme of the book. I wish I'd have seen a real review on this book before I shelled out $30.
Good supplement to Tufte August 17, 2005
A. S. Johnson (Anchorage, AK)
For someone like me, a programmer interested in creating better user interfaces, this is a really good book. I have no formal training in creating better visual displays, and this book has helped me understand decent graph layout. I've read the Tufte books, and while I really like them, they are often more qualitative than quantitative (no pun intended) in their descriptions. This book spells out how to make a good table based on the type of data, the number of fields being used, the relationship of the fields, etc. It's very hands on and very usable. My one complaint is I think he strays too far in to the cognitive aspect of how we see and understand data than he needs to given the focus of this book.
Showing reviews 16-20 of 31
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