One of my favorite book lists
April 2, 2012 – 4:33 pmHere’s a list I got from an Edward Tufte one-day seminar in 2001. I read a lot of the books on the list (you can see my library call numbers I scrawled on there back in the day). They were instrumental in helping me understand how to interpret and present scientific information.
The web stuff is almost certainly way out of date; everything else is still great. I particularly recommend the William Cleveland books (the one you can’t see is Visualizing Data). Statistics classes should start with Visualizing Data instead of standard textbooks.
Edward Tufte still does the one day course and it is excellent. Grad students in particular are at a great stage to benefit, so I highly recommend it to them.
2 Responses to “One of my favorite book lists”
This is an interesting list. Thanks for posting it.
I’ve checked a few of the books out, and have liked what I’ve read so far. At first I thought that, in “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information,” Tufte was being somewhat strident on the point of removing excess clutter from graphs. I think I’m coming around though.
By Steven B on Jul 31, 2012
Glad you are enjoying the list. Thanks for the comment. That is an old book by now so it may seem dated but I think it was revolutionary at the time. When I read it 10 years ago I know it affected me a lot. Many of the sleeker looking web graphics we see these days I think have some design roots in Tufte’s work.
By Anthony on Aug 2, 2012