Fundamentals of Data Visualization

Annotated Bibliography

No single book can cover everything there is to know about a topic. I encourage you to read other texts on data visualization to deepen your understanding and to develop your technical skills in making figures. Here, I provide a limited selection of books that I have personally found interesting, thought-provoking, or helpful. Books listed in the first section are the most similar in scope to the present book, and may provide complementary or alternative perspectives on the topics I have covered. Books listed in “Programming Books” address the important topic of how to make visualizations using programming approaches and available software libraries. The remaining sections list other books that will expand your knowledge of data visualization and help you communicate with visuals and data.

Thinking About Data and Visualization

The following books discuss the thought processes and decision making required for turning data into visualizations. They serve as introductory texts on how to choose what visualizations to make and what pitfalls to look out for:

Alberto Cairo. The Truthful Art. New Riders, 2016.

An excellent all-around introduction to data visualization, in particular for journalists. The book covers many important concepts of data visualization, such as how to visualize distributions, trends, uncertainty, and maps. In many chapters, it also serves as an introduction to basic statistical principles, explaining concepts such as populations, samples, ...