I hate being ill and forced to stay at home (in bed). The one thing it does allow me, though, is to read books that I always wanted to read, might have purchased already but since had no time to go for.

I just finished Edward R. Tufte’s wonderful The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and have to say I love the book.

Part of my professional life deals with a software solution that pushes out real time business data to thousands of desktops. Lots of customer sessions focus on how data could and should be displayed, arranged, sorted, colored, structured, labeled and so on.

Reading Tufte gave me great new insight into the art of visualizing not only numbers but numbers in ther context, not only graphics, but graphics with a meaning.

My favorite chapter is Chapter 5 of Part II: Chartjunk: Vibrations, Grids, and Ducks . Tufte not only provides valuable insight into his research, his books comes along with a wealth of examples taken from real world sources of how wrong data has been graphically represented. And I have to admit even in the charts my company and I have worked out together with some customers, we stepped into some of the traps Tufte identified.

Apart from the precise way the content is presented in I also liked the manufacturaing quality of the book itself. It is brialliantly designed and the quality of the paper just feels good while turning the pages.

I read the Second Edition of the book and have just ordered _Beautiful Evidence” from Amazon to learn more