15 Unmissable Data Visualization Books

A stunning collection of Data Visualization books, ranging from education to inspiration and every nugget in-between. Pick up any of these and you are sure to improve your data-viz capabilities!

Storytelling With Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals

Author: Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic

Don't simply show your data—tell a story with it!

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.

Storytelling is not an inherent skill, especially when it comes to data visualization, and the tools at our disposal don't make it any easier. 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. Specifically, you'll learn how to:

• Understand the importance of context and audience
• Determine the appropriate type of graph for your situation
• Recognize and eliminate the clutter clouding your information
• Direct your audience's attention to the most important parts of your data
• Think like a designer and utilize concepts of design in data visualization
• Leverage the power of storytelling to help your message resonate with your audience

Together, the lessons in this book will help you turn your data into high impact visual stories that stick with your audience. Rid your world of ineffective graphs, one exploding 3D pie chart at a time. There is a story in your data—Storytelling with Data will give you the skills and power to tell it!

Data Visualisation: A Handbook for Data Driven Design

Author: Andy Kirk

One of the "six best books for data geeks" - Financial Times

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.

Combining 'how to think' instruction with a 'how to produce' mentality, this book takes readers step-by-step through analysing, designing, and curating information into useful, impactful tools of communication.

With this book and its extensive collection of online support, readers can:

• Decide what visualisations work best for their data and their audience using the chart gallery
• See data visualisation in action and learn the tools to try it themselves
• Follow online checklists, tutorials, and exercises to build skills and confidence
• Get advice from the UK's leading data visualisation trainer on everything from getting started to honing the craft.

Better Data Visualizations – A Guide for Scholars, Researchers, and Wonks

Author: Jonathan Schwabish

Now more than ever, content must be visual if it is to travel far. Readers everywhere are overwhelmed with a flow of data, news, and text. Visuals can cut through the noise and make it easier for readers to recognize and recall information. Yet many researchers were never taught how to present their work visually.

This book details essential strategies to create more effective data visualizations. Jonathan Schwabish walks readers through the steps of creating better graphs and how to move beyond simple line, bar, and pie charts.

Through more than five hundred examples, he demonstrates the do’s and don’ts of data visualization, the principles of visual perception, and how to make subjective style decisions around a chart’s design.

Schwabish surveys more than eighty visualization types, from histograms to horizon charts, ridgeline plots to choropleth maps, and explains how each has its place in the visual toolkit. It might seem intimidating, but everyone can learn how to create compelling, effective data visualizations. This book will guide you as you define your audience and goals, choose the graph that best fits for your data, and clearly communicate your message.

#MakeoverMonday: Improving How We Visualize and Analyze Data, One Chart at a Time

Author: Eva Murray and Andy Kriebel

Explore different perspectives and approaches to create more effective visualizations

#MakeoverMonday offers inspiration and a giant dose of perspective for those who communicate data. Originally a small project in the data visualization community, #MakeoverMonday features a weekly chart or graph and a dataset that community members reimagine in order to make it more effective. The results have been astounding; hundreds of people have contributed thousands of makeovers, perfectly illustrating the highly variable nature of data visualization. Different takes on the same data showed a wide variation of theme, focus, content, and design, with side-by-side comparisons throwing more- and less-effective techniques into sharp relief.

This book is an extension of that project, featuring a variety of makeovers that showcase various approaches to data communication and a focus on the analytical, design and storytelling skills that have been developed through #MakeoverMonday. Paging through the makeovers ignites immediate inspiration for your own work, provides insight into different perspectives, and highlights the techniques that truly make an impact.

• Explore the many approaches to visual data communication
• Think beyond the data and consider audience, stakeholders, and message
• Design your graphs to be intuitive and more communicative
• Assess the impact of layout, color, font, chart type, and other design choices

Creating visual representation of complex datasets is tricky. There’s the mandate to include all relevant data in a clean, readable format that best illustrates what the data is saying—but there is also the designer’s impetus to showcase a command of the complexity and create multidimensional visualizations that “look cool.” #MakeoverMonday shows you the many ways to walk the line between simple reporting and design artistry to create exactly the visualization the situation requires.

Information Is Beautiful

Author: David McCandless

Facts, statistics, issues, theories, relationships, numbers, words - there is just too much information in the world. We need a brand new way to take it all in. 'Information is Beautiful' transforms the ideas surrounding and swamping us into graphs and maps that anyone can follow at a single glance.

Knowledge Is Beautiful: Impossible Ideas, Invisible Patterns, Hidden Connections - Visualized

Author: David McCandless

In this sequel to the bestselling book The Visual Miscellaneum, author David McCandless uses stunning and unique visuals to reveal unexpected insights into how the world really works.

Every day, every hour, every minute we are bombarded with information, from television, from newspapers, from the Internet, we’re steeped in it. We need a way to relate to it. Enter David McCandless and his stunning infographics, simple, elegant ways to interact with information too complex or abstract to grasp any way but visually. McCandless creates visually stunning displays that blend the facts with their connections, contexts, and relationships, making information meaningful, entertaining, and beautiful. And his genius is as much in finding fresh ways to provocatively combine datasets as it is in finding new ways to show the results.

Knowledge is Beautiful is a fascinating spin through the world of visualized data, all of it bearing the hallmark of David McCandless’s boundary-breaking, signature style. The captivating follow-up to the bestseller The Visual Miscellaneum, Knowledge is Beautiful offers a deeper, more ranging look at the world and its history, with more connectivity between the pages, a greater exploration of causes and consequences, and a more inclusive global outlook. With a portion of its content crowd-sourced from McCandless’s international following, Knowledge is Beautiful achieves a revolutionary and democratic look at the key issues from questions on history and politics, the facts of science, streams of literature, and much more.

This is a project that will truly push the boundaries of books everywhere, providing insights into our world in a way never seen before.

Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction

Author: Kieran Healy

An accessible primer on how to create effective graphics from data

This book provides students and researchers a hands-on introduction to the principles and practice of data visualization. It explains what makes some graphs succeed while others fail, how to make high-quality figures from data using powerful and reproducible methods, and how to think about data visualization in an honest and effective way.

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.

Effective graphics are essential to communicating ideas and a great way to better understand data. This book provides the practical skills students and practitioners need to visualize quantitative data and get the most out of their research findings.

• Provides hands-on instruction using R and ggplot2
• Shows how the “tidyverse” of data analysis tools makes working with R easier and more consistent
• Includes a library of data sets, code, and functions

Data Sketches: A journey of imagination, exploration, and beautiful data visualizations

Author: Nadieh Bremer and Shirley Wu

In Data Sketches, Nadieh Bremer and Shirley Wu document the deeply creative process behind 24 unique data visualization projects, and they combine this with powerful technical insights which reveal the mindset behind coding creatively. Exploring 12 different themes – from the Olympics to Presidents & Royals and from Movies to Myths & Legends – each pair of visualizations explores different technologies and forms, blurring the boundary between visualization as an exploratory tool and an artform in its own right. This beautiful book provides an intimate, behind-the-scenes account of all 24 projects and shares the authors’ personal notes and drafts every step of the way.

The book features:

• Detailed information on data gathering, sketching, and coding data visualizations for the web, with screenshots of works-in-progress and reproductions from the authors’ notebooks
• Never-before-published technical write-ups, with beginner-friendly explanations of core data visualization concepts
• Practical lessons based on the data and design challenges overcome during each project
• Full-color pages, showcasing all 24 final data visualizations

This book is perfect for anyone interested or working in data visualization and information design, and especially those who want to take their work to the next level and are inspired by unique and compelling data-driven storytelling.

Hands-On Data Visualization: Interactive Storytelling From Spreadsheets to Code

Author: Jack Dougherty and Ilya Ilyankou

Tell your story and show it with data, using free and easy-to-learn tools on the web. This introductory book teaches you how to design interactive charts and customized maps for your website, beginning with simple drag-and-drop tools such as Google Sheets, Datawrapper, and Tableau Public. You'll also gradually learn how to edit open source code templates like Chart.js, Highcharts, and Leaflet on GitHub.

Hands-On Data Visualization takes you step-by-step through tutorials, real-world examples, and online resources. This practical guide is ideal for students, nonprofit organizations, small business owners, local governments, journalists, academics, and anyone who wants to take data out of spreadsheets and turn it into lively interactive stories. No coding experience is required.

• Build interactive charts and maps and embed them in your website
• Understand the principles for designing effective charts and maps
• Learn key data visualization concepts to help you choose the right tools
• Convert and transform tabular and spatial data to tell your data story
• Edit and host Chart.js, Highcharts, and Leaflet map code templates on GitHub
• Learn how to detect bias in charts and maps produced by others

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Author: Edward R. Tufte

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.

This is the second edition of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. This edition provides excellent color reproductions of the many graphics of William Playfair, adds color to other images, and includes all the changes and corrections accumulated during 17 printings of the first edition.

The Book of Dash: Build Dashboards with Python and Plotly

Author: Adam Schroeder and Christian Mayer

Create stunning interactive dashboard applications in Python with the Dash visualization and data analysis tool. Build interfaces that make sense of your data, and make it pretty.

A swift and practical introduction to building interactive data visualization apps in Python, known as dashboards. You’ve seen dashboards before; think election result visualizations you can update in real time, or population maps you can filter by demographic. With the Python Dash library you’ll create analytic dashboards that present data in effective, usable, elegant ways in just a few lines of code.

The book is fast-paced and caters to those entirely new to dashboards. It will talk you through the necessary software, then get straight into building the dashboards themselves. You’ll learn the basic format of a Dash app in a Twitter analysis dashboard that tracks numbers of likes over time. You’ll then build up skills through three more sophisticated projects. The first compares world data in three areas: volume of internet usage, percentage of parliament seats held by women, and CO2 emissions; the second is a financial portfolio dashboard that models your investments; and the third is visualizesmachine learning algorithms. The final chapter sets you up with some useful final skills, like debugging your code and applying color themes.

In this book you will:

• Create and run your first Dash apps
• Use the pandas library to manipulate and analyze social media and API data
• Create a variety of stunning and effective charts using Plotly
• Learn to use bar charts, chloropleth maps, contour plots, and more
• Examine and build on existing apps written by the pros

Dash combines several technologies to get you building dashboards quickly and efficiently. This book will do the same.

Visual Journalism: Infographics from the World's Best Newsrooms and Designers

Author: Javier Errea and Gestalten

As the world grows more complex, some of the best stories are told through visuals – infographics. From election results to catastrophes to wars to scientific discoveries: the stream of data we are exposed to daily becomes ever more complicated. Infographics help make sense of it, transforming difficult to grasp facts and figures into accessible visualizations. Print media are increasingly making successful use of them. Visual Journalism reveals the masters of this discipline and their finest works. The portraits of studios and individuals within this compendium illustrate how the world of infographics continues to evolve as it informs data and graphic trends. A visual revolution showcases the myriad possibilities of non-verbal communication.

How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information

Author: Alberto Cairo

A leading data visualization expert explores the negative―and positive―influences that charts have on our perception of truth.

Today, public conversations are increasingly driven by numbers. While charts, infographics, and diagrams can make us smarter, they can also deceive―intentionally or unintentionally. To be informed citizens, we must all be able to decode and use the visual information that politicians, journalists, and even our employers present us with each day. Demystifying an essential new literacy for our data-driven world, How Charts Lie examines contemporary examples ranging from election result infographics to global GDP maps and box office record charts, as well as an updated afterword on the graphics of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Effective Data Storytelling: How to Drive Change with Data, Narrative and Visuals

Author: Brent Dykes

Master the art and science of data storytelling—with frameworks and techniques to help you craft compelling stories with data.

The ability to effectively communicate with data is no longer a luxury in today’s economy; it is a necessity. Transforming data into visual communication is only one part of the picture. It is equally important to engage your audience with a narrative—to tell a story with the numbers. Effective Data Storytelling will teach you the essential skills necessary to communicate your insights through persuasive and memorable data stories.

Narratives are more powerful than raw statistics, more enduring than pretty charts. When done correctly, data stories can influence decisions and drive change. Most other books focus only on data visualization while neglecting the powerful narrative and psychological aspects of telling stories with data. Author Brent Dykes shows you how to take the three central elements of data storytelling—data, narrative, and visuals—and combine them for maximum effectiveness. Taking a comprehensive look at all the elements of data storytelling, this unique book will enable you to:

• Transform your insights and data visualizations into appealing, impactful data stories
• Learn the fundamental elements of a data story and key audience drivers
• Understand the differences between how the brain processes facts and narrative
• Structure your findings as a data narrative, using a four-step storyboarding process
• Incorporate the seven essential principles of better visual storytelling into your work
• Avoid common data storytelling mistakes by learning from historical and modern examples

Effective Data Storytelling: How to Drive Change with Data, Narrative and Visuals is a must-have resource for anyone who communicates regularly with data, including business professionals, analysts, marketers, salespeople, financial managers, and educators.

Fundamentals of Data Visualization: A Primer on Making Informative and Compelling Figures

Author: Claus O. Wilke

I hope you found this post useful. I know it certainly reminded me of the value of these books, some of which are mainstays on my desk!