The Top 30 Best Data Visualization Books on Our Reading List
Our editors have compiled this directory of the best data visualization books based on Amazon user reviews, rating, and ability to add business value.
There are loads of free resources available online (such as Solutions Review’s Data Analytics Software Buyer’s Guide, visual comparison matrix, and best practices section) and those are great, but sometimes it’s best to do things the old fashioned way. There are few resources that can match the in-depth, comprehensive detail of one of the best data visualization books.
The editors at Solutions Review have done much of the work for you, curating this comprehensive directory of the best data visualization books on Amazon. Titles have been selected based on the total number and quality of reader user reviews and ability to add business value. Each of the books listed in the first section of this compilation (the first 12) have met a minimum criteria of 15 reviews and a 4-star-or-better ranking.
Below you will find a library of titles from recognized industry analysts, experienced practitioners, and subject matter experts spanning the depths of data visualization for beginners all the way to advanced data storytelling best practices for BI power users. This compilation includes publications for practitioners of all skill levels. We’ve also included a new section below that features recent and upcoming data visualization book selections that are worth checking out.
Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction
“Data Visualization builds the reader’s expertise in ggplot2, a versatile visualization library for the R programming language. Through a series of worked examples, this accessible primer then demonstrates how to create plots piece by piece, beginning with summaries of single variables and moving on to more complex graphics. Topics include plotting continuous and categorical variables; layering information on graphics; producing effective “small multiple” plots; grouping, summarizing, and transforming data for plotting; creating maps; working with the output of statistical models; and refining plots to make them more comprehensible.”
Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals
“Storytelling with Data teaches you the fundamentals of data visualization and how to communicate effectively with data. You’ll discover the power of storytelling and the way to make data a pivotal point in your story. The lessons in this illuminative text are grounded in theory, but made accessible through numerous real-world examples—ready for immediate application to your next graph or presentation. This book demonstrates how to go beyond conventional tools to reach the root of your data, and how to use your data to create an engaging, informative, compelling story.”
Fundamentals of Data Visualization: A Primer on Making Informative and Compelling Figures
“Effective visualization is the best way to communicate information from the increasingly large and complex datasets in the natural and social sciences. This practical book takes you through many commonly encountered visualization problems, and it provides guidelines on how to turn large datasets into clear and compelling figures. What visualization type is best for the story you want to tell? How do you make informative figures that are visually pleasing? Author Claus O. Wilke teaches you the elements most critical to successful data visualization.”
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd Edition
“The classic book on statistical graphics, charts, tables. Theory and practice in the design of data graphics, 250 illustrations of the best (and a few of the worst) statistical graphics, with detailed analysis of how to display data for precise, effective, quick analysis. Design of the high-resolution displays, small multiples. Editing and improving graphics. The data-ink ratio. Time-series, relational graphics, data maps, multivariate designs. Detection of graphical deception: design variation vs. data variation. Sources of deception. Aesthetics and data graphical displays.”
The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication
“In this highly anticipated follow-up to The Functional Art—Alberto Cairo’s foundational guide to understanding information graphics and visualization—the respected data visualization professor explains in clear terms how to work with data, discover the stories hidden within, and share those stories with the world in the form of charts, maps, and infographics. In The Truthful Art, Cairo transforms elementary principles of data and scientific reasoning into tools that you can use in daily life to interpret data sets and extract stories from them. The Truthful Art is also packed with inspirational and educational real-world examples of data visualizations from such leading publications.”
Storytelling with Data: Let’s Practice!
“Let’s practice! helps you build confidence and credibility to create graphs and visualizations that make sense and weave them into action-inspiring stories. Expanding upon best seller storytelling with data’s foundational lessons, Let’s practice! delivers fresh content, a plethora of new examples, and over 100 hands-on exercises. Author and data storytelling maven Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic guides you along the path to hone core skills and become a well-practiced data communicator. The lessons and exercises found within this comprehensive guide will empower you to master―or develop in others―data storytelling skills and transition your work from acceptable to exceptional.”
The Big Book of Dashboards: Visualizing Your Data Using Real-World Business Scenarios
“The Big Book of Dashboards presents a comprehensive reference for those tasked with building or overseeing the development of business dashboards. Comprising dozens of examples that address different industries and departments and different platforms (print, desktop, tablet, smartphone, and conference room display) The Big Book of Dashboards is the only book that matches great dashboards with real-world business scenarios. By organizing the book based on these scenarios and offering practical and effective visualization examples, The Big Book of Dashboards will be the trusted resource that you open when you need to build an effective business dashboard.”
Interactive Data Visualization for the Web: An Introduction to Designing with D3
“Create and publish your own interactive data visualization projects on the web—even if you have little or no experience with data visualization or web development. This fully updated and expanded second edition takes you through the fundamental concepts and methods of D3, the most powerful JavaScript library for expressing data visually in a web browser. Ideal for designers with no coding experience, reporters exploring data journalism, and anyone who wants to visualize and share data, this step-by-step guide will also help you expand your web programming skills by teaching you the basics of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and SVG.”
Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten
“Most presentations of quantitative information are poorly designed—painfully so, often to the point of misinformation. We use tables and graphs to communicate quantitative information: the critical numbers that measure the health, identify the opportunities, and forecast the future of our organizations. Even the best information is useless, however, if its story is poorly told. This problem exists because almost no one has ever been trained to design tables and graphs for effective and efficient communication. Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten is the most accessible, practical, and comprehensive guide to table and graph design available.”
Good Charts: The HBR Guide to Making Smarter, More Persuasive Data Visualizations
“In Good Charts, dataviz maven Scott Berinato provides an essential guide to how visualization works and how to use this new language to impress and persuade. Dataviz today is where spreadsheets and word processors were in the early 1980s—on the cusp of changing how we work. Berinato lays out a system for thinking visually and building better charts through a process of talking, sketching, and prototyping. Good Charts will help you turn plain, uninspiring charts that merely present information into smart, effective visualizations that powerfully convey ideas.”
Data Visualization Made Simple
“Data Visualization Made Simple is a practical guide to the fundamentals, strategies, and real-world cases for data visualization, an essential skill required in today’s information-rich world. With foundations rooted in statistics, psychology, and computer science, data visualization offers practitioners in almost every field a coherent way to share findings from original research, big data, learning analytics, and more. Both novices and seasoned designers in education, business, and other areas can use this book’s effective, linear process to develop data visualization literacy and promote exploratory, inquiry-based approaches to visualization problems.”
Effective Data Visualization: The Right Chart for the Right Data
“Written by sought-after speaker, designer, and researcher Stephanie D. H. Evergreen, this book shows readers how to create Excel charts and graphs that best communicate data findings. This comprehensive how-to guide functions as a set of blueprints―supported by research and the author’s extensive experience with clients in industries all over the world―for conveying data in an impactful way. Delivered in Evergreen’s humorous and approachable style, the book covers the spectrum of graph types available beyond the default options, how to determine which one most appropriately fits specific data stories, and easy steps for making the chosen graph in Excel.”
Data Points: Visualization That Means Something
“Whether it’s statistical charts, geographic maps, or the snappy graphical statistics you see on your favorite news sites, the art of data graphics or visualization is fast becoming a movement of its own. In Data Points: Visualization That Means Something,author Nathan Yau presents an intriguing complement to his bestseller Visualize This, this time focusing on the graphics side of data analysis. Using examples from art, design,business, statistics, cartography, and online media, he explores both standard-and not so standard-concepts and ideas about illustrating data. Create visualizations that register at all levels, with DataPoints: Visualization That Means Something.”
Data Visualization: Principles and Practice, Second Edition
“The second edition of Data Visualization: Principles and Practice provides a streamlined introduction to various visualization techniques. The book illustrates a wide variety of applications of data visualizations, illustrating the range of problems that can be tackled by such methods, and emphasizes the strong connections between visualization and related disciplines such as imaging and computer graphics. It covers a wide range of sub-topics in data visualization: data representation; visualization of scalar, vector, tensor, and volumetric data; image processing and domain modeling techniques; and information visualization.”
“In today’s data-driven world, professionals need to know how to express themselves in the language of graphics effectively and eloquently. Yet information graphics is rarely taught in schools or is the focus of on-the-job training. Now, for the first time, Dona M. Wong, a student of the information graphics pioneer Edward Tufte, makes this material available for all of us. The book is organized in a series of mini-workshops backed up with illustrated examples, so not only will you learn what works and what doesn’t but also you can see the dos and don’ts for yourself. This is an invaluable reference work for students and professional in all fields.”
“In Stories That Stick, Kindra Hall, professional storyteller and nationally-known speaker, reveals the four unique stories you can use to differentiate, captivate, and elevate. Telling these stories well is a simple, accessible skill anyone can develop. With case studies, company profiles, and anecdotes backed with original research, Hall presents storytelling as the underutilized talent that separates the good from the best in business. She offers specific, actionable steps readers can take to find, craft, and leverage the stories they already have and simply aren’t telling. Every person, every organization has at least four stories at their disposal. Will you tell yours?”
Visualization Analysis and Design (AK Peters Visualization Series)
“Visualization Analysis and Design provides a systematic, comprehensive framework for thinking about visualization in terms of principles and design choices. The book features a unified approach encompassing information visualization techniques for abstract data, scientific visualization techniques for spatial data, and visual analytics techniques for interweaving data transformation and analysis with interactive visual exploration. It emphasizes the careful validation of effectiveness and the consideration of function before form. The book is suitable for a broad set of readers, from beginners to more experienced visualization designers.”
Data Visualization: A Handbook for Data Driven Design
“Never has it been more essential to work in the world of data. Scholars and students need to be able to analyze, design and curate information into useful tools of communication, insight and understanding. This book is the starting point in learning the process and skills of data visualization, teaching the concepts and skills of how to present data and inspiring effective visual design. With over 200 images and extensive how-to and how-not-to examples, this new edition has everything students and scholars need to understand and create effective data visualisations.”
Presenting Data Effectively: Communicating Your Findings for Maximum Impact
“Now in striking full color, Presenting Data Effectively, Second Edition by Stephanie D. H. Evergreen shows readers how to make the research results presented in reports, slideshows, dashboards, posters, and data visualizations more interesting, engaging, and impactful. The book guides students, researchers, evaluators, and non-profit workers―anyone reporting data to an outside audience―through design choices in four primary areas: graphics, text, color, and arrangement. The Second Edition features an improved layout with larger screenshots, a review of the recent literature on data visualization, and input from a panel of graphic design experts.”
Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could actually visualize data in such a way that we could maximize its potential and tell a story in a clear, concise manner? Thanks to the creative genius of Nathan Yau, we can. With this full-color book, data visualization guru and author Nathan Yau uses step-by-step tutorials to show you how to visualize and tell stories with data. He explains how to gather, parse, and format data and then design high quality graphics that help you explore and present patterns, outliers, and relationships. Visualize This demonstrates how to explain data visually so that you can present your information in a way that is easy to understand and appealing.”
R for Data Science: Import, Tidy, Transform, Visualize, and Model Data
“Learn how to use R to turn raw data into insight, knowledge, and understanding. This book introduces you to R, RStudio, and the tidyverse, a collection of R packages designed to work together to make data science fast, fluent, and fun. Suitable for readers with no previous programming experience, R for Data Science is designed to get you doing data science as quickly as possible. Authors Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund guide you through the steps of importing, wrangling, exploring, and modeling your data and communicating the results. Each section of the book is paired with exercises to help you practice what you’ve learned along the way.”
Communicating Data with Tableau: Designing, Developing, and Delivering Data Visualizations
“Go beyond spreadsheets and tables and design a data presentation that really makes an impact. This practical guide shows you how to use Tableau Software to convert raw data into compelling data visualizations that provide insight or allow viewers to explore the data for themselves. Ideal for analysts, engineers, marketers, journalists, and researchers, this book describes the principles of communicating data and takes you on an in-depth tour of common visualization methods. You’ll learn how to craft articulate and creative data visualizations with Tableau Desktop 8.1 and Tableau Public 8.1.”
Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis
“Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis teaches simple, practical means to explore and analyze quantitative data–techniques that rely primarily on using your eyes. This book features graphical techniques that can be applied to a broad range of software tools, including Microsoft Excel, because so many people have nothing else, but also more powerful visual analysis tools that can dramatically extend your analytical reach. You’ll learn to make sense of quantitative data by discerning the meaningful patterns, trends, relationships, and exceptions that measure your organization’s performance and reveal what will likely happen in the future.”
Cool Infographics: Effective Communication with Data Visualization and Design
“Research shows that visual information is more quickly and easily understood, and much more likely to be remembered. This innovative book presents the design process and the best software tools for creating infographics that communicate. Including a special section on how to construct the increasingly popular infographic resume, the book offers graphic designers, marketers,and business professionals vital information on the most effective ways to present data. With Cool Infographics, you’ll learn to create infographics to successfully reach your target audience and tell clear stories with your data.”
Better Presentations: A Guide for Scholars, Researchers, and Wonks
“Designed for presenters of scholarly or data-intensive content, Better Presentations details essential strategies for developing clear, sophisticated, and visually captivating presentations. Following three core principles―visualize, unify, and focus―Better Presentations describes how to visualize data effectively, find and use images appropriately, choose sensible fonts and colors, edit text for powerful delivery, and restructure a written argument for maximum engagement and persuasion. It pushes presenters past the frustration and intimidation of the process to more effective, memorable, and persuasive presentations.”
“The author has discussed everything related to data visualization. You are first familiarized with the fundamentals of data visualization to help you know what it is and why it is of importance to any organization. The author has then discussed the various types of tools that can be used for data visualization. These tools include the basic, specialized and advanced ones. Practically, the author focuses on how to visualize data in the Python programming language. The process of plotting different types of data using different types of plots has been discussed. Python codes have been provided alongside images of the expected outputs and the corresponding code descriptions.”
“This book will provide you with clean, clear recipes, and solutions that explain how to handle common data manipulation and scientific computing tasks with pandas. You will work with different types of datasets, and perform data manipulation and data wrangling effectively. You will explore the power of pandas DataFrames and find out about boolean and multi-indexing. Tasks related to statistical and time series computations, and how to implement them in financial and scientific applications are also covered in this book. By the end of this book, you will have all the knowledge you need to master pandas, and perform fast and accurate scientific computing.”
Practical Tableau: 100 Tips, Tutorials, and Strategies from a Tableau Zen Master
“Whether you have experience with Tableau or are just getting started, this manual goes beyond the basics to help you build compelling, interactive data visualization applications. Author Ryan Sleeper complements his web posts and instructional videos with this guide to give you a firm understanding of how to use Tableau to find valuable insights in data. Over five sections, Sleeper—recognized as a Tableau Zen Master, Tableau Public Visualization of the Year author, and Tableau Iron Viz Champion—provides visualization tips, tutorials, and strategies to help you avoid the pitfalls and take your Tableau knowledge to the next level.”
Data, Driven Security: Analysis, Visualization and Dashboards
“You’ll soon understand how to harness and wield data, from analysis as well as visualization and presentation. Using a hands-on approach with real-world examples, this book shows you how to gather feedback, measure the effectiveness of your security methods, and make better decisions. Everything in this book will have practical application for information security professionals. Helps IT and security professionals understand and use data, so they can thwart attacks and understand and visualize vulnerabilities in their networks Includes more than a dozen real-world examples and hands-on exercises that demonstrate how to analyze security data and intelligence.”
Learning Tableau – How Data Visualization Brings Business Intelligence to Life
“In the professional world, turning massive amounts of data into something that can be seen and understood is vitally important. Tableau is a rare software platform that is intuitive and even fun to use, which also enables you to dive deep into answering complex questions about your data. Starting with creating your first dashboard in Tableau 9.0, this book will let you in on some useful tips and tricks, teach you to tell data stories using dashboards, and teach you how to share these data stories. Practical examples along with detailed explanations of how and why various techniques work will help you learn and master Tableau quickly.”
Recent Releases Worth Checking Out
How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information
“In How Charts Lie, data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world.”
“The ability to visualize data is now a skill in demand across business, government, NGOs and academia. Data Visualization: Charts, Maps, and Interactive Graphics gives an overview of a wide range of techniques and challenges, while staying accessible to anyone interested in working with and understanding data. Whether you are a student considering a career in data science, an analyst who wants to learn more about visualization, or the manager of a team working with data, this book will introduce you to a broad range of data visualization methods.”
“Starting with data and visualization concepts, this book takes you on a journey through increasingly advanced topics to help you work toward becoming a professional analytics solution provider. Examples of analyzing real-world data are used to illustrate how to work with Spotfire. Once you’ve covered the AI-driven recommendations engine, you’ll move on to understanding Spotfire’s rich suite of visualizations and when, why and how you should use each of them. In later chapters, you’ll work with location analytics, advanced analytics using TIBCO Enterprise Runtime for R, how to decide whether to use in-database or in-memory analytics, and how to work with streaming (live) data in Spotfire.”
“Geospatial Health Data: Modeling and Visualization with R-INLA and Shiny describes spatial and spatio-temporal statistical methods and visualization techniques to analyze georeferenced health data in R. The book features fully reproducible examples of several disease and environmental applications using real-world data such as malaria in The Gambia, cancer in Scotland and USA, and air pollution in Spain. Examples in the book focus on health applications, but the approaches covered are also applicable to other fields that use georeferenced data including epidemiology, ecology, demography or criminology.”
Introduction to Information Visualization: Transforming Data into Meaningful Information
‘Introduction to Information Visualization: Transforming Data into Meaningful Information is for anyone interested in the art and science of communicating data to others. It shows readers how to transform data into something meaningful – information. This book is applicable to students in all domains, to researchers who need to understand how to create graphics that explain their data, and to professionals and administrators for professional development training. Website Designers and Human-Computer Interaction researchers will appreciate the backstory of designing interactive visualizations for the web.”
“After a quick overview of the SAS architecture and components, the book will take you through the different approaches to importing and reading data from different sources using SAS. You will then cover SAS Base and 4GL, understanding data management and analysis, along with exploring SAS functions for data manipulation and transformation. Next, you’ll discover SQL procedures and get up to speed on creating and validating queries. In the concluding chapters, you’ll learn all about data visualization, right from creating bar charts and sample geographic maps through to assigning patterns and formats.”
“Something is wrong with business communication. Executives find themselves tortured with overloaded reports and bored by confusing presentations. This reference book demonstrates how visual consistency improves communication with reports, presentations and dashboards. The authors transfer the principle of “notation standards” commonly found in many disciplines such as music or engineering to business communication. They develop a visual reporting language and apply it to the charts and tables used in business reports, presentation slides and interactive management information systems. Practical examples prove: They are on the right track.”
Information Visualization: Perception for Design (Interactive Technologies)
“Information Visualization: Perception for Design, Fourth Edition explores the art and science of why we see objects the way we do. Based on the science of perception and vision, the author presents the key principles at work for a wide range of applications–resulting in visualization of improved clarity, utility and persuasiveness. This new edition has been revised and updated to include the latest relevant research findings. Content has been updated in areas such as the cognitive neuroscience of maps and navigation, the neuroscience of pattern perception, and the hierarchy of learned patterns.”
“Avoiding Data Pitfalls is a reputation-saving handbook for those who work with data, designed to help you avoid the all-too-common blunders that occur in data analysis, visualization, and presentation. Plenty of data tools exist, along with plenty of books that tell you how to use them―but unless you truly understand how to work with data, each of these tools can ultimately mislead and cause costly mistakes. This book walks you step by step through the full data visualization process, from calculation and analysis through accurate, useful presentation. Common blunders are explored in depth to show you how they arise, how they have become so common, and how you can avoid them from the outset.”
Fullstack D3 and Data Visualization: Build beautiful data visualizations with D3
“We have the data. But it needs to be understood by humans. The best way to convert this data into an understandable format is to mold it into a data visualization. The Fullstack D3 book is the complete guide to D3. With dozens of code examples showing each step, you can gain new insights into your data by creating visualizations. The author (Amelia Wattenberger) is a front-end developer and designer with a background in neuroscientific research. Over the past ten years that she has been visualizing data,she has distilled her knowledge into bite-sized lessons. Readers will start by making charts right away, and learn new concepts and design theory as they go.”