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Information Visualization
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Author: Robert Spence, ACM Press
List Price: $68.00
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0201596261
Publisher: Pearson Addison Wesley (15 December, 2000)
Edition: Hardcover
Sales Rank: 159,386
Average Customer Rating: 3.75 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 3 out of 5
Promises a lot- -doesn¿t quite deliver
This book is an overview textbook of information visualization techniques. The first chapter is very enticing- -it describes many visualization problems, and provides some historical examples of specific visualization techniques of the past. The rest of the book takes up assorted topics such as representation, internal models, and connectivity, and provides some examples of visualization techniques. Unfortunately, the text is too concise to be used for independent study. I found myself puzzled over how to interpret most of the new visualization techniques. For most of the techniques, Spence provides little or no guidance about interpretation, and few suggestions about how to make effective use of the techniques. An instructor who is a specialist in the subject would presumably be able to provide the missing information, but readers who pick up this book on their own might not be able to gain the information they are seeking. The publisher has also developed a companion Website for the book, with exercises and answers, dynamic examples, and OHPs for classroom use. It would have been nice, however, to also provide the materials on a CD-ROM for users who do not have continuous broadband access to the Net.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Read Tufte again instead
I'd really like to give the book one single star, the reason being that its title 'Information Visualization' puts greater demand on the way the book illustrates its concepts and thoughts. As the exhibits are often ugly, data-poor and most of the times situated on different pages than the text that refers to them (seems to me an absolute basic in this discipline), the reading of the book is not enjoyable but rather painful. Compare this to any of the works of Tufte.
The text is also not written with care (again, compare with Tufte), but instead in a (not very literate) over-scholarly fashion. Take, for example, this reference from page 146: "The World Wide Web is of enormous size and complexity (Bray, 1996)".
It gets a two-star rating because it actually compiles a number of computerized visualization models (when reading, skip the descriptions of the non-computerized - they lack analysis and insight) which can provide a starting point for further exploration of the field. However, I am in no way assured that this compilation is the best one, or even a very good one. I'll keep looking.
Rating: 5 out of 5
So clear!
It's rare to read a technical book and come away thinking "But surely that's obvious!" That's how well Prof. Spence explains the subject matter and why this book is utterly indespensible (in my opinion). 5 stars!
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· Information Visualization in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery
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