Leland Wilkinson (1944–2021)

The first part is on developing a grammar of graphics for statistical charting and is possibly relevant to general info vis. This material is why I purchased the book in the first place, because I was looking for some background on H. Wickham's ggplot2. Incidentally, anyone looking for same would be better served just reading the original ggplot2 paper. As such, Wilkinson gives a relatively straight forward look at the constituent grammatical parts and their interaction.

The second part of the book is more theoretical and philosophical in tone. Sections will go by without any direct reference to the grammar, but the issues raised are certainly things I've struggled with when doing ad hoc charting in systems without a grammar, like Processing.

This is not a book for idle browsing. In particular, there are example figures which are suboptimal or not recommended which are not clearly labeled as such necessitating reading the full discussion in the text to find out which these are. This is also not the book for just learning to do statistical graphics (for which I'd recommend H. Wickham, N. Yau, etc.). It might be a book for implementers of comprehensive statistical graphing applications.… (altro)