Blake Tregre found a typo on page 55 of Visualizing Data in one of the comments:

// Set the value of m arbitrarily high, so the first value
// found will be set as the maximum.
float m = MIN_FLOAT;

That should instead read something like:

// Set the value of m to the lowest possible value,
// so that the first value found will automatically be larger.
float m = MIN_FLOAT;

This also reminds me that the Table class used in chapter 4, makes use of Float.MAX_VALUE and -Float.MAX_VALUE, which are inherited from Java. Processing has constants named MAX_FLOAT and MIN_FLOAT that do the same thing. We added the constants because -Float.MAX_VALUE seems like especially awkward syntax when you’re just trying to get the smallest possible float. The Table class was written sometime before the constants were added to the Processing syntax, so they use the Java approach.

There is a Float.MIN_VALUE in Java, however the spec does a very unfortunate thing, because MIN_VALUE is defined as “A constant holding the smallest positive nonzero value of type float”, which sounds promising until you realize that it just means a very tiny positive number, not the minimum possible value for float. It’s not clear why they thought this would be a more useful constant (or useful at all).

And to make things even more confusing, Integer.MAX_VALUE and Integer.MIN_VALUE behave more like the way you might expect, where the MIN_VALUE is in fact that the lowest (most negative) value for an int. Had they used the same definition as Float.MIN_VALUE, then Integer.MIN_VALUE would equal 1. Which illustrates just how silly it is to do that for the Float class.