Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions
Toby Segaran, Jeff Hammerbacher
... The contents are less impressive: O'Reilly bring together a heterogeneous group of authors and let them fend for themselves, with no editorial effort to unite their stories. Some authors hold their own, presenting interesting analyses and visualizations, or just interesting tales, others are less successful. (The spectrum of statistical expertise, for example, is bounded by Andrew Gelman and a graduate student believing that normality is a requirement of the central-limit theorem). 'Interesting' is a good thing, but for $40 I would like 'useful', and here the book comes up short. An appealing leisure read, but not much more, I am afraid.
