Recommended reading for BA Dev Day 2014

readme.md

Highly recommended books

The Functional Art – Alberto Cairo.

The best I’ve read on designing data visualisations and infographics, and which I constantly refer back to.

Design for Information – Isabel Meirelles

Really good theory and explanation about how and why visualisations work.

Other good books

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi

http://book.flowingdata.com/

D3 stuff

This is where I started:

http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000345/index.html

and I now use these a lot too:

https://leanpub.com/D3-Tips-and-Tricks

https://www.dashingd3js.com/ (for the newsletter mainly)

The forums on Stackoverflow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/d3.js) and Google Groups are super useful (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/d3-js).

Server

If you are practicing on your own PC at home, then you need to run a local server; I use the node.js http-server on my laptop:

http://nodejs.org/

http://www.jhh.me/blog/2012/12/24/setting-up-http-server-on-windows-with-node-js/

Examples of D3 charts

https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery

http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock

http://christopheviau.com/d3list/gallery.html

Help with choosing good colour schemes

http://colorbrewer2.org/

Most useful and interesting blogs on data visualisation

http://eagereyes.org/

http://flowingdata.com/

http://www.thefunctionalart.com/

http://junkcharts.typepad.com/junk_charts/

http://www.informationisbeautifulawards.com/

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/

http://dadaviz.com/

Additional javascript libraries and tools that you may want to look at

http://square.github.io/crossfilter/ - allows you to reduce/group data (aka like PivotTables in Excel but in code) in your javascript\

http://nickqizhu.github.io/dc.js/ - allows you to easily create linked charts (nb requires crossfilter as well)

https://github.com/d3/d3-plugins/tree/master/sankey - extends D3.js to make Sankey diagrams

http://dimplejs.org/ and http://nvd3.org/ provides a simpler library for creating standard charts using D3.js

http://raw.densitydesign.org - provides a GUI into more sophisticated D3 visualisations

Enjoy!