Getting started with data visualization? [closed]

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A friend asked me to check out Wefeelfine and I was just flabbergasted on seeing the concept and the execution. I looked further and browsed through umpteen examples of data visualization and each one of them is cool to say the least.

I'm at home and currently nothing interesting do. Can anyone give me some pointers as to where I can start learning about data visualization. Any books, blogs or other resources would be great.

Thanks.

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Books by Edward Tufte are considered classic. Start with "Visual Display of Quantitative Information". William Cleveland is recommended a lot, but a bit more old-school. Check out Ben Fry, Nick Felton, John Maeda, or many others that I am leaving out. There are also many good blogs, such as:
Information Aesthetics
Information is Beautiful
Flowing Data
Visual Complexity
Visualizing.org

And there are tons of packages out there, like matplotib, protovis, ggplot2, circos, etc...

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Ben Fry and Stephen Few are a great resource for inspiration when it comes to data visualization.

I use Protovis and Processing.org for visualizing data.

Also, Harvard has made available for free their CS171 - Visualization class. Highly recommended.

Jer Throp's data visualization tutorials with Processing. http://blog.blprnt.com/source-code-tutorial

Visualization online class -- Harvard's CS171 class (videos and slides) http://cs171.org/

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I just replied on a similar topic, with this very handy article about a range of data visualisation toolchains, hosts, environments and languages. It might seem a little overwhelming at first, but choice is freedom, and the specialisation of various methods allows for really unique solutions to really unique situations. And, even better, there's a huge amount of open source solutions (with more every month!).

Link: 22 Free Tools for Data Visualization and Analysis

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If you fancy JavaScript, a great starting combo is the highcharts visualization library and jsondata.com.

Using Highcharts' examples and jsondata.com's realtime embed code, you could produce an interactive visualization in no time.