Tufte's New Book

O'Reilly editor Peter Meyers' wrote on our internal mailing list: "Fellow Edward Tufte fans: in case you haven't heard the good news, his new book, Beautiful Evidence, is out. I just got my copy yesterday and while I'm not yet finished I can already urge you to grab a copy. The chapter on sparklines is a wonderful summation of how these new word-sized graphics can improve the explanatory power of our prose. Baseball fans in particular will love how he suggests sportswriters start using sparklines in their articles. Another chapter on mapped pictures shows ways that carefully placed labels can really illuminate what's happening in a complex figure. Like all his other books, this one's a publishing work of art: the page layout, the paper and figure quality, the prose. This one's another keeper. And great news -- in the intro he says he's planning another volume to complement the previous four in this series. Mark your calendars for 2013."