Jeremy Gillies

Learn Pro­cess­ing

I chose Pro­cess­ing as the visu­al­i­sa­tion tool of choice although there are plenty of alter­na­tive tools out there. I wanted the con­trol that Pro­cess­ing lends the user. It is also very pow­er­ful. It is for me, as a front end devel­oper, a steep learn­ing curve. Here are three books that have helped me start to make my own visualisations:

If you are com­pletely new to pro­gram­ming this book is by far the sim­plest to fol­low and I found best writ­ten for the com­plete new­comer. It guides you through the basics of Java, in plain Eng­lish with­out Jar­gon. Def­i­nitely the place to start if you’ve not touched code before.
Buy Daniel Shiff­man Learn­ing Pro­cess­ing on Amazon

Another book for begin­ners, Green­berg guides you through the basics of the Java lan­guage. It is very thor­ough and it’s page length is daunt­ing how­ever very lit­tle is miss­ing. Green­berg speaks from expe­ri­ence and writes at length about the back­ground to com­pu­ta­tional art. He comes from the per­spec­tive of a graphic artist ven­tur­ing into pro­gram­ming and it was com­fort­ing to know he made it through.
Buy Ira Green­berg Pro­cess­ing on Amazon

Fry’s O’Reilly edi­tion assumes at least some pro­gram­ming expe­ri­ence, if not a good under­stand­ing of Pro­cess­ing, from the reader. He guides the user through sev­eral real world exam­ples of using Pro­cess­ing for Data Visu­al­iza­tion. YThis is of par­tic­u­lar inter­est to me. Many con­cepts are quite advanced so I will cer­tainly be dip­ping into this more as I learn.
Buy Ben Fry Visu­al­iz­ing Data on Ama­zon

Learn good data visu­al­iza­tion practice

Here are a few essen­tial books for the shelf of any self respect­ing Data Visu­al­i­sa­tion cre­ator. I’ll be adding to these

Edward Tufte Beau­ti­ful Evi­dence
Buy on Amazon

David McCan­d­less Infor­ma­tion is Beau­ti­ful
Buy on Amazon

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This is a must-read for any­one who encounter huge ships daily and do not want to get run over by them. I found this book extremely help­ful. To this day, I have never been run over by a sin­gle huge ship!!

This book lacks cri­te­ria for dis­cern­ing between huge ships and merely really big ships.

I never leave the house with­out this indis­pen­si­ble lit­tle book. It has lit­er­ally saved my life many times while walk­ing down Peck­ham High Street and Eal­ing Broadway

via Amazon.com

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