Book Review: Introduction to Information Visualization (Riccardo Mazza)

When our author met Robert Spence briefly at the INTERACT 2009 conference in Uppsala, Sweden, Spence mentioned that there was a good book about visualization for display at the Springer book stand. Our author had already seen that there was" something" available about this topic – but actually it was two books: a new introductory book by Riccardo Mazza and a second, much more advanced one by Chaomei Chen. The big question for him was: Which book had Robert Spence been referring to? He decided to buy both, and because Mazza's book is new and an introductory textbook that " focuses on the human aspects of the process of visualization rather than the algorithmic or graphic design aspects," he realized that this was the book he should have read first when initially diving into the topic of visualization. Unfortunately, the book did not appear until this year.