How can you take advantage of data that you might otherwise never use? With the help of a powerful new programming environment, Visualizing Data demonstrates methods for representing data accurately on the Web and elsewhere, complete with user interaction, animation, and more. We're not talking about cookie-cutter charts and graphs. This book teaches you how to design entire interfaces around large, complex data sets.

You'll learn basic visualization principles, how to choose the right kind of display for your purposes, and how to provide interactive features that will bring users to your site over and over. Visualizing Data, and the popular Processing platform it introduces, is ideal for researchers, companies, and anyone who wants to convey specific data in a clear and understandable manner.

Enormous quantities of data go unused or underused today, simply because people can't visualize the quantities and relationships in it. How do the 3.1 billion A, C, G and T letters of the human genome compare to those of a chimp or a mouse? What do the paths that millions of visitors take through a web site look like? With Visualizing Data, you learn how to answer complex questions like these with thoroughly interactive displays. You'll discover:

• The seven stages of visualizing data -- acquire, parse, filter, mine, represent, refine, and interact
• How all data problems begin with a question and end with a narrative construct that provides a clear answer without extraneous details
• Several example projects with the code to make them work
• Positive and negative points of each representation discussed. The focus is on customization so that each one best suits what you want to convey about your data set

This book does not provide ready-made "visualizations" that can be plugged into any data set. Instead, with chapters divided by types of data rather than types of display, you'll learn how each visualization conveys the unique properties of the data it represents -- why the data was collected, what's interesting about it, and what stories it can tell. Visualizing Data teaches you how to answer questions, not simply display information.

Our book is still in progress, but you can get going on this technology through our Rough Cuts edition, which gives you access to the manuscript as it evolves, either online or via PDF. Order online now!

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