Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Informative and amusing
Comment: At last .. a documenting tech-head with a sense of humour. I found this book enlightening, amusing (ok tongue-in-cheek style) and useful. What more could you want in a manual? The book is a little more glossy than it needs to be, and if they cut down on the white-space it would fit into my handbag. However, the content is excellent. It's easy to read, easy to follow, and gives you everything you need to know about developing the most effective and efficient dashboards. I recommend this to everyone who has to design and/or develop performance solutions for their business community.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Very good visuals, good book. Ought to be called Elements of Reporting Style
Comment: I'm trying to improve my skills in the concise presentation of data. This book was easy to read and has very helpful visual examples with lots of good criticism and guidelines. I recommend this book.
Here's how it could be improved. First, it's too long. He says some things several times, when he usually said it best the first time. (To be fair, he probably spent a huge amount of time on layout and graphics, and probably had to produce 200 pages.) It's a good book at 200 pages. If they used normal margins and said only what was necessary, it could be a Great book at 75 pages. Not a big deal. It's easy reading.
Also, this is not anything like a developer's guide. There is ZERO mention of any software--purely about how the graphs/data should look. This book is about clear presentation (which starts with thoughtful and simple design), not about how to build anything.
A main principle in his advice is to get rid of all the excess ink; forget the art, this is about communicating information. To a large extent, and as a basis, he's right. But towards the end of the book, he dings some attractive designs for using photo-realistic shading and other little dress-ups that actually look really good in some cases. He goes a little too far toward visually-bland at times, but in many cases he's right--many times the things we add to try to dress up a view actually detract from the information, flow, and grokking of the communice.
Once again, I recommend this book. Just keep in mind that mankind has been evolving the elements of style in written communication for a few thousand years. This book will help.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Second Half is Where It's At
Comment: The first half of the book is a large sampling of dashboards from various applications, and it can be both over whelming as well as what seems a little dated.
If you were expecting GUI eye candy, this is not the book for you.
The second half of the book enumerates a large list of attributes found in good dashboard designs, describing in impact of things like color, boldness, size and so forth. It then goes into a very well written treaty concerning each of these attributes, what they convey, what they don't, and how they interact with other attributes.
If you're looking to display a lot of information in a condensed area in a way that's summarizing and still quite meaningful, this is the book for you. It is a fantastic resource for visualizing data.
If the book covered more detail, used examples with mouth watering GUIs, ad put the examples last, it would have scored five stars.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A high-water mark in the category
Comment: I don't use or create dashboards, but I've been looking for clear guidance in the area of graphs and charts. The Wall Street Journal and the Economist seems to have mastered the job of cranking them out. Instead of aping the ones in the paper, I needed some background training to appreciate what I'm seeing. I tried Tufte's beautiful work, but found it too abstract for a first-timer.
Stephen Few is evidently a man of taste and wisdom. This volume speaks eloquently and in the just the right amount about common pitfalls and the path that avoids them. He performs a tremendous and valuable service assimilating work by other greats in this field and adding useful innovations of his own.
If you appreciate great design, and work with numbers, especially Excel, this will make you a hero. Rarely do you acquire expensive new skills as easily as you will by reading this book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent view to complex numbers
Comment: I consider that this book is really useful for a person like me.. who have the principles about Dashboards but don't hnow how present the numbers in the best way...
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