Manuel Lima

I was looking forward to reading this book, and I snatched up the Kindle version for a good price, fully realizing the graphics would be hard to decipher compared to the physical book. Dozens and dozens of "circular" representations are covered. Each is described, with short explanations. But what I missed was what we used to call the "so-what" factor. In order to truly appreciate these representations, I wanted the author to explain what conclusions one could draw from each. With no analysis of any of the diagrams, I couldn't tell if a diagram was useful, or whimsical, or enabled the designer to discover something that no one had ever considered before.… (mais)

When I first saw this book I was blown away. Of course, I had seen information presented in trees before and had even developed some small family trees..and used decision trees for some purposes but I had never seen a book devoted just to visualising information via tree patterns. I guess, in the final analysis I was a bit disappointed in the book. Basically it is a historical overview of the use of tree type diagrams ...or branching diagrams. They have been used in theology, in family trees and in trees of laws and evolutionary trees. More modern presentations include the use of circular trees and logarithmic trees. And probably, one of the more useful variations is the rectangular "tree" where information is packed into a rectangular shape and the size of the rectangles is really proportional to a percentage of the whole. The use of this format has become quite common with trade figures such as imports and exports by commodity, by country, by value etc. Generally, the approach is to let the pictures speak for themselves ...with a few very old trees (as old as the author could find examples) ranging through to quite modern examples. I guess, I was a little disappointed that there was little or no guidance on using such trees in the presentation of data. No summary of the pros and cons of each or recommendations on using modern programs with the various tree layouts. So, in this sense, the book was a bit of a let-down. It promised more than it delivered. The illustrations are great and some of the newer tree forms such as Voronio Treemaps were both fascinating and attractive....and probably useful. I give it three stars.… (mais)