Alberto’s other books were quite good AND I think this is one of the rare books that’s truly supposed to be for “the mainstream”, not just for a data vis crowd. I was curious to see how he explained the topic to completely new people in the area without being boring – so I read it.
I liked it a lot! It was such an easy read in the sense that my eyes were flowing over the pages for minutes and then hours and then I looked up and was like, “oh, I already read half of the book”. It was a joy to read because of all the stories he talked about.
What’s special about this data vis book, in my opinion, is that the content of the charts & maps are interesting, not just what Alberto says about them. So Alberto doesn’t say: “Here’s a chart with boring fruits; just sample data; and I want to demonstrate why you need to start bar charts at zero”. He’s taking current political issues and charts and therefore ties the content to the form really tightly. I liked that a lot.
Two things stood out for me:
First, the repeated “hey, this chart might be bad not because its creator is evil, but because they simply made an error or didn’t know better.” I liked the empathy in repeating this.
Second, the part “Charts can change not just the opinion of the readers, but also your own.” I’ve experienced that quite a bit in the past years. It’s always a nice feeling of “Oh, something is different than you had expected.”
That said, this book is more about data literacy than about data vis. Maybe I didn’t expect before reading that book that data vis design and data literacy are such different fields. It’s overlapping, but not as much as I thought. If you’re looking for a book that teaches you good data vis, this is probably not for you.