I was already of the big fan of The Functional Art, Alberto Cairo's previous book, and this one is just as good, i.e., excellent. On top of it, it's a gorgeous book, with a ton of examples illustrating all the principles of data visualization Cairo explains, all in glorious colors, demonstrating the power of data visualization. Cairo weaves in some very mild statistical content in there (mostly descriptive stuff). But overall, the book is mostly about using visualization appropriate for the data, what one wants to communicate, in the most effective way. On top of it, Cairo's writing style is crystal clear, friendly, and humble, which makes this book appropriate for any audience.

This book will be my main text for the dataviz section of my undergraduate curriculum on data science.

Highly recommended. Can't wait for the next one. ( )

A somewhat journalistic take on information visualization, addressing charts, infographics, interactive data visualizations and other forms of news applications. The book does a good job of introducing visual encoding principles, talks about typical visualization tasks such as communicating change and relationships, and provides a good collection of contemporary examples. What makes it stand out to some extent is a serious attempt to explain concepts of statistical certainty and other aspects of accuracy.