Books to read

Must Read

Read these cover-to-cover

• The big book of dashboards

• The wall street journal: Guide to information design

• Show me the numbers

• Dear Data

• Good charts

• Information dashboard design

Others

If you're planning to stick with the domain of data visualisation, keep adding the following books to your library, else skip.

• The visual display of quantitative information

• The book of circles

• The book of trees

• Knowledge is beautiful

• The infographic history of the world

• The best American infographics

• The data journalism handbook

• Visualize this

• Data points

• The functional art

Videos to watch

• The beauty of data visualization

• Moving beyond data visualization

• Data visualisation overview

• Data visualisation for non-programmers

• Data Visualization: Storytelling with Data

• Data Visualization: Types of Data

• Data Visualization at Uber

Understand analysis

Go through these courses. Practice these in your day-to-day.

• Product Analytics Essentials: 3 Reports to Drive Impact | Learn with Mixpanel | Veronica Pinchin | Skillshare

• Fundamentals of Google Analytics | Jeff Sauer | Skillshare

Use these two tools inside-out, and as regularly as possible. This is probably one of the easiest ways to understand analytics.

Explore further

• YouTube things like: How to read waterfall chart, How to read scatterplot

• Once you learn the basics of different chart types, start looking at charts as "UI to represent quantitative data". This is the only way you can stop limiting with chart types and start designign user interfaces to communicate the data.

• Start looking for examples from anywhere and everywhere. E.g. A review breakdown bar in Google Play Store is nothing but a well designed, composed Bar Chart. E.g. A real estate website showing crime rate in the locality is nothing but a heat map on a geographical map. E.g. A mind-map diagram can be applied to represent relationships → In a website site-map to even a metric relationship system.

• Learn Excel (or Google Sheets). Do that by exercising on simple data sheets: Your bank statement could be a start. YouTube's where you'll find resources to map your data, create data models etc.

• Learn from Entertainment. This is one of the most underrated sources of good inspiration for Data Viz and analytics. Cricket/ Football matches show a lot of data analysis. Games and Games UI design are another great source for futuristic UI and interactions.