The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition

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.

Tufte's book is a very fine book on data graphics.

Although this book gives a lot of simple advice on how to effectively communicate quantitative information, it is not just a recipe-like book, as it also makes you think about a data graphic as something that is telling a story with numbers.

Beware that not all advice given is easily applied using common office suites. This is by no means a problem with the book, it is just that the text is not at all software-oriented. In fact, you may start to see the limitations in the office suites themselves. So, for those who just want some fast rules to use in their favorite software, this book may not be enough, or even the most recommended one. For all other readers, I highly recommend it.

I returned to Tufte's first classic book of graphic design principles over 20 years after first discovering it. At the time, I was the corporate librarian for a major electric utility, and the explosion in the organization and creation of information by individuals with new personal-computer hardware and software was just beginning (I had an IBM PC-XT with 640Kb of RAM and two 360k floppies--no hard drive).

Now, I wondered, aside from the masterpiece of graphic design that "Visual Display" of course still represents, did Tufte's theories of graphics design still apply in a world where those computers at our fingertips pack the power and sophistication of the best publishing equipment? The answer is yes: Tufte's guidelines are timeless and universal, and most of his examples predate the computer era and even the 20th century.

The guidelines boil down to the single principle of making design choices that result in the simplest possible display of complex data. While that may not sound profound, Tufte provides simple and practical rules for implementing sound design choices, and the resulting improvements in your documents and web designs will be noticeable.

I was able to read this fairly quickly. (stealing a few hours here and there at work).

Although I did not find any direct solutions to my current problems - it definitely opened my imagination to consider new possibilities.

It definitely was interesting and educational to read and see Tufte's presentation on Visual Dispaly of Quantitative Information. He illustrates the good, the bad, and the ugly of graphic displays over the centuries. However, I was hoping to see more examples of current computer graphics that should be emulated in this edition instead of terse comments and skeletal constructs in this area.