I'm beginning a project at work that will require generation of some graphical representations of data to try to make it more digestible. Jenn recommended two books by Edward R. Tufte, an expert on graphical representation of data. She said they were expensive though, but education and excellence are more than worth the money, so Google purchased copies of them for our Engineering Library.

I'm currently reading The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. I thought it would be _REALLY_ dry material, but I've found that I'm absolutely fascinated by the stuff he says. He presents the glory and pitfalls of graphical representations of data all the while giving a history lessons of charts and graphs... and damn if it isn't really interesting! One of the things I think that really holds my interest is that he presents excellent graphs and charts beginning with some of the first known graphs (around a couple hundred years ago). He also shows graphs from different areas of study through time and shows how they are awesome or how they aren't...

I started reading it this morning and I'm already 60 pages in.... I only stopped because I was so excited about it that I wanted to post this entry. :)