Blood, guts, gore and the data fairy
The O’Reilly press folks passed along this review (PDF) of Visualizing Data from USENIX magazine. I really appreciated this part:
My favorite thing about Visualizing Data is that it tackles the whole process in all its blood, guts, and gore. It starts with finding the data and cleaning it up. Many books assume that the data fairy is going to come bring you data, and that it will either be clean, lovely data or you will parse it carefully into clean, lovely data. This book assumes that a significant portion of the data you care about comes from some scuzzy Web page you don’t control and that you are going to use exactly the minimum required finesse to tear out the parts you care about. It talks about how to do this, and how to decide what the minimum required finesse would be. (Do you do it by hand? Use a regular expression? Actually bother to parse XML?)
Indeed, writing this book was therapy for that traumatized inner child who learned at such a tender young age that the data fairy did not exist.
