I loved how it was not the xth “These are the advantages and disadvantages of a bar chart” book. Neil hit a good compromise between catering to newsbies and making more advanced data vis people think about new stuff. For the first time in printing, Neil discussed things like “waves of data vis”. That’s amazing! I’m so happy that the community is at a point where we can go beyond the “introductions to data vis” books.
I don’t think there’s another data vis book out there with so many personal anecdotes and strong opinions. I actually really liked seeing Neil arguing with himself; saying “others might say y but I still do x.” I really liked his honesty, too, when it came to criticism, and to showing his early attempts. I’d recommend this book to everyone who wants to know how it is to create data visualizations in the open.
What I didn’t quite understand what the – in my opinion – fairly low quality of the book as an object. Why were almost all the images blury, and the text often unreadable? Why did no visualization (not even the big, beautiful ones!) get a full spread of two pages? Most visualization in the book seemed “too small”, and I had to glue my eyes to the pages to make out what they were about (the best example maybe being the visualization on page 125. It looks beautiful! I want to see it in big!).