Customer Rating:  
Summary: Practical Approaches to Displaying Quantitative Information
Comment: This is a good book with immediate and useful applicability to displaying quantitative information. Stephen Few takes a deliberate and logical approach to teaching readers how best to present quantitative information in the form, primarily, of tables and graphs.
For those individuals who present quantitative information in the form of slides and/or handouts, this book offers a great guide and reference for how to maximize the impact and effectiveness of the presentation of quantitative information.
I recommend this book to readers whose job involves presenting quantitative information, or who have a general interest in how to optimize the presentation of quantitative information.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Very good if you target your reading
Comment: If you are like me, you are probably a very busy person. You pick this book up because you would like to improve a certain aspect of your employment skills: tables or graphs. This isn't a skill that will make or break your career, so it is something you want to be able to pick up quickly.
One great thing about this book is that you can flip through the pages and see many great and obviously poor examples - Few makes the contrasts between these examples very clear. Without reading a word, you would probably pick up a few tips.
If you read this book in a specific manner, you can pick up some skills very quickly. The chapters on designing tables and graphs (mainly chapters 7, 8, and 9) are invaluable.
The problem I had was that I had to read through a lot of somewhat extraneous material to find the real meat of the book. While Visual Perception is interesting, for instance, I didn't feel the need to know so much about it. A lot of the material could have been shortened.
Also, if you are well-versed in working with numbers, you should probably skip the first couple of chapters - I'm sure you already know this material.
But overall, thanks to Few for taking a rather elusive topic to most of us and making it crystal clear!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Show Me the Numbers
Comment: The book is good for someone that has never used or dealt with the design and graphic presentation of data. This book is NOT for someone who has skill in developing tables and charts for presentation, and is looking for new and different ways to present data.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Reference for Tables & Simple Charts
Comment: A complete book on tables, and simple graphs. Stephen Few seems to follow the same scarcity principles as Edward Tufte when it comes to "ink". Here the additional bonus is that the author compares many "good" yet subtly different charts so that you get a good intuitive feel for selecting the most appropriate one. He plays with contrasts, colors, type, alignement, column ordering and more. After reading this book, you will know how to make well designed tables and charts that can really make the numbers speak.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Practical Tufte
Comment: This book is a gold mine of practical information for the creation of tables and graphs. I really like the Tufte books as well, but have found them to be more general and difficult to apply. Few takes those ideas, adds many of his own and shows the nitty gritty of creating useful charts. I've been looking for a book like this for a long, long time.
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