47% Off Discounts: Lowest Price Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics Review

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Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics Review

I really enjoyed this book. It is absolutely beautifully printed and the examples are well made and well explained. There are a couple of things I would have liked to see done a little differently.
First, every example uses Adobe Illustrator to make the visualization look as good as they do. In order to complete the exercises, you must have Illustrator. Nathan does explain that it can be obtained at a discount or you can an older version, but it's still a pretty big financial investment. If I hadn't been able to dig up a old copy, Illustrator 9, I would have been out of luck. Even with my outdated copy, not everything worked for me. If he had included at least a couple of examples with the open source Inkscape, this would have been a 5 star rating.
The second thing I would have liked to see a little different is more statistical info to go along with the visualizations. We often visualize data to help make decisions. Nathan shows how to display a LOESS line to see the best fit for the curve, but he stops there. Maybe discussing R² ( correlation coefficient) analysis to determine whether the values are are a good match would help me feel better about analyzing the data beyond just visualization.
That said, this is an extremely well written book and easily deserves 4 stars. Dig up an old copy of Illustrator (preferably CSx versions) and enjoy this book.

Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics Overview

Practical data design tips from a data visualization expert of the modern age
Data doesn?t decrease; it is ever-increasing and can be overwhelming to organize in a way that makes sense to its intended audience. Wouldn?t it be wonderful if we could actually visualize data in such a way that we could maximize its potential and tell a story in a clear, concise manner? Thanks to the creative genius of Nathan Yau, we can. With this full-color book, data visualization guru and author Nathan Yau uses step-by-step tutorials to show you how to visualize and tell stories with data. He explains how to gather, parse, and format data and then design high quality graphics that help you explore and present patterns, outliers, and relationships.
Presents a unique approach to visualizing and telling stories with data, from a data visualization expert and the creator of flowingdata.com, Nathan Yau
Offers step-by-step tutorials and practical design tips for creating statistical graphics, geographical maps, and information design to find meaning in the numbers
Details tools that can be used to visualize data-native graphics for the Web, such as ActionScript, Flash libraries, PHP, and JavaScript and tools to design graphics for print, such as R and Illustrator
Contains numerous examples and descriptions of patterns and outliers and explains how to show them

Visualize This demonstrates how to explain data visually so that you can present your information in a way that is easy to understand and appealing. From the Author: Telling Stories with Data A common mistake in data design is to approach a project with a visual layout before looking at your data. This leads to graphics that lack context and provide little value. Visualize This teaches you a data-first approach. Explore what your data has to say first, and you can design graphics that mean something.Visualization and data design all come easier with practice, and you can advance your skills with every new dataset and project. To begin though, you need a proper foundation and know what tools are available to you (but not let them bog you down). I wrote Visualize This with that in mind. You'll be exposed to a variety of software and code and jump right into real-world datasets so that you can learn visualization by doing, and most importantly be able to apply what you learn to your own data. Three Data Visualization Steps:1) Ask a Question (Click Graphic to See Larger Version)

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45% Off Discounts: Purchase Cheap Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition Review

Are you looking to buy Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition? here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition. check out the link below:

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Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition Review

When we design Web sites, we often overlook the simplest things because we're too wrapped up in the design. After working on Web sites for a while, some of us have slowly moved away from what we know is usable to adding or removing elements that may enhance the `look' - and also break a site's usability.
Steer back on track with the new edition of Krug's highly referenced book. Novice, intermediate, expert. No matter where you are on the scale, the book provides value to everyone - even managers, testers and project managers. Management likes to get their hands a little dirty when it comes to Web design projects and sharing this book may make the team's life easier.
Anyone involved with Web design or usability will recognize most, if not all, of the concepts covered in the book. What makes Don't Make Me Think usable is that it's a great checklist to ensure you've covered all the basics.
Krug provides many before and after examples to show how a few changes can enhance a Web site's usability. The illustrations reinforce the concepts covered as well as how visitors use and read a Web site.
As for the differences between the first and second editions, the second addition has three new chapters while usability testing shrinks from two chapters to one and with good reason.
The testing chapter breaks down the testing process into digestible steps; complete with a script between the tester (user) and the person watching the tester. Too often, we've seen testing get mangled or ignored. With this chapter, teams might find themselves empowered and eager to do testing.
The chapter on "Usability as common courtesy" explores how a site can make or break the "reservoir of goodwill" as Krug puts it. We arrive at a Web site with some goodwill and depending on how well the site meets or misses our needs; the goodwill level goes up or down. It may only take one mistake to propel visitors to flee.
Another new and short chapter is "Accessibility, Cascading Style Sheets and you." Krug captures what developers and designers hear when it comes to accessibility and addresses what they fear. He lists five things designers and developers can do make a site accessible without a lot of effort.
Finally, the book closes with "Help! My boss wants me to..." Krug has received plenty emails and questions on the topic to identify two questions that repeatedly come up. He provides email examples for free re-use, so no one has to explain it to the boss.
It only takes about two hours or a plane trip to read. The writing is conversational, clear and packs a punch with a dash of humor thrown in. Reading the book is not much different than reading fiction because it flows well and the information sinks in without much effort.
If you get this book and have the 1st edition, I recommend keeping both. You might find helpful stuff in the original material not found in the new edition.

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition Overview

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60% Off Discounts: Purchase Cheap The Yahoo Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World Review

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The Yahoo Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World Review

There's a lot of information packed into The Yahoo! Style Guide a new book from Yahoo!. While other style guides and manuals have kept the topics of writing, user-interface, webpage coding, and SEO separate-The Yahoo! Style Guide brings it all together-making it a one-stop-guide for every member of your digital team.
One of the most useful chapters in the book is on copywriting for search engine optimization (SEO), and includes tips about keywords, links, page titles and metatags. People and search engines don't scan pages in the exact same way but there are some similarities to keep in mind, e.g. both need to know: what a page is about, what's important, options for acquiring more information.
There are excellent suggestions too, about how to "write for the world." We're reminded that the Web is a worldwide medium and "site visitors probably come from more than one country and more than one culture. Collectively, they probably speak several languages. It's a good practice to make the text on your site clear to as many people as possible." Five best practices we're urged to put into practice are: 1) Keep the sentence structure simple, 2) Include "signposts": words that help readers see how the parts of a sentence relate, 3) Eliminate ambiguity, 4) Avoid uncommon words and nonliteral usages, and 5) Rewrite text that doesn't translate literally.
You can read through the style guide from beginning to end and use it as a reference when stumped with a punctuation question, wondering how to write a perfect title for your email newsletter or streamlined text for mobile devices. The book is filled with loads of great tips. One of my favorites is on editing with screen-reading software so you can hear the page read aloud to you. (In Windows, Narrator or Ease of Use in Windows Vista and on the Mac, Text-to-Speech.)
The Yahoo! Style Guide is also available online with a companion website and includes additional resources and updates. You'll find a good companion in The Yahoo! Style Guide.

The Yahoo Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World Overview

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