This isn’t a textbook, but Dataclysm by Christian Rudder was a major inspiration to me when I was new to data analysis. The book is like a long data analysis project around dating on OKCupid (Rudder founded the site), and has a lot of good graphs made just for the book. Unlike some of the popular examples made famous by e.g. Tufte, the graphs in Dataclysm are of the type an analyst in 2020 might typically make in their day-to-day work. Lots of scatter plots and bar plots, but created thoughtfully enough to really be something. Rarely in this book did I think “ah, beautiful”—much more often, I thought “ah, yup, I see the relationship he’s saying exists.”
The version of Dataclysm that I read had red font in addition to black font, and I found it was quite striking as a way to do emphasis. When I started writing my personal journal, I adopted red and black felt-tipped pens because I enjoyed the font colours from the book.
This isn’t a textbook, but Dataclysm by Christian Rudder was a major inspiration to me when I was new to data analysis. The book is like a long data analysis project around dating on OKCupid (Rudder founded the site), and has a lot of good graphs made just for the book. Unlike some of the popular examples made famous by e.g. Tufte, the graphs in Dataclysm are of the type an analyst in 2020 might typically make in their day-to-day work. Lots of scatter plots and bar plots, but created thoughtfully enough to really be something. Rarely in this book did I think “ah, beautiful”—much more often, I thought “ah, yup, I see the relationship he’s saying exists.”
The version of Dataclysm that I read had red font in addition to black font, and I found it was quite striking as a way to do emphasis. When I started writing my personal journal, I adopted red and black felt-tipped pens because I enjoyed the font colours from the book.