A while back I reviewed Larry Keller’s book The Tableau 8.0 Training Manual, at the same time I ordered George Peck’s book Tableau 8: the official guide. It’s just arrived. The book comes with a DVD containing bonus videos featuring George Peck’s warm, friendly tones and example workbooks. I must admit to being mildly nonplussed at […]
My unstoppable reading continues, this time I’ve polished off The Tableau 8.0 Training Manual: From Clutter to Clarity by Larry Keller. This post is part review of the book, and part review of Tableau. Tableau is a data visualisation application which grew out of academic research on visualising databases. I’ve used Tableau Public a little bit […]
Following my revelations regarding sharing code with other people I thought I’d read more about the craft of writing code in the form of Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftmanship by Robert C. Martin. Despite the appearance of the word Agile in the title this isn’t a book explicitly about a particular methodology […]
I bought Natural Language Processing in Python by Steven Bird, Ewan Klein & Edward Loper for a couple of reasons. Firstly, ScraperWiki are part of the EU Newsreader Project which seeks to make a “history recorder” using natural language processing to convert large streams of news articles into a more structured form. ScraperWiki’s role in […]
Next in my book reading, I turn to Interactive Data Visualisation for the web by Scott Murray (@alignedleft on twitter). This book covers the d3 JavaScript library for data visualisation, written by Mike Bostock who was also responsible for the Protovis library. If you’d like a taster of the book’s content, a number of the examples […]
This week I’ve been programming in JavaScript, something of a novelty for me. Jealous of the Dear Leader’s automatically summarize tool I wanted to make something myself, hopefully a future post will describe my timeline visualising tool. Further motivations are that web scraping requires some knowledge of JavaScript since it is a key browser technology […]
Machine learning is about prediction, and prediction is a valuable commodity. This sounds pretty cool and definitely the sort of thing a data scientist should be into, so I picked up Machine Learning in Action by Peter Harrington to get an overview of the area. Amongst the examples covered in this book are: Given that […]
This is a review of Robert I. Kabacoff’s book R in Action which is a guided tour around the statistical computing package, R. My reasons for reading this book were two-fold: firstly, I’m interested in using R for statistical analysis and visualisation. Previously I’ve used Matlab for this type of work, but R is growing in […]
