101 Data Visualization and Analytics Projects (Paperback)

Almost excellent. A second edition could easily push it to five stars.

I had been on the fence about this one for a while, and I should have bought it sooner. I found myself making notes in the margins, which is always a good sign. It is denser than the page count suggests, and I found myself slowing down around the middle. A good addition to a technical library, as long as you know what you are buying.

This is the one to get if you are serious about introductory & beginning.

There is a particular kind of technical book that is dense without being difficult, and this is one of them. A few of the examples could be more realistic, but the underlying points come across clearly. The code samples assume a particular environment, which took a bit of fiddling to get running properly. The index and cross-references are surprisingly good, which matters for a book I will come back to. An easy five stars from me. I look forward to whatever the author writes next.

Outstanding. I kept finding reasons to come back to it.

This is the third book I have read on introductory & beginning this year, and it is comfortably the best of them. The author avoids over-explaining, which keeps the pace up but means you need to pay attention. The early chapters move quickly through material I already knew, but the later sections were genuinely new to me. If you have the prerequisites, this is an easy recommendation. I will be keeping it on my desk rather than the shelf.