I read the 2017 version.
Summary
A book that I have been searching for a while in terms of its contents if you have been reading my previous book review. At the same time, the books before have built a base of information or knowledge that this book can continue to build upon. As the title of the book goes, much of the content of this book is devoted to dashboards, especially the overall formatting and design of a dashboard. The main bulk of the contents in the book are individual case studies of dashboards. The cases studies which are divided into a chapter each discusses the following:
- The dashboard
- The scenario
- How it is used
- Why it works
- Discussion on the approach taken and at times offer alternative approaches
- Author commentary on the dashboards
Things I like
1. It has a variety of examples. The book is divided into 3 main portions - foundation, scenarios, and discussion on using dashboards successfully in the real world. The part on scenarios that takes up the bulk of the chapters provides an array of dashboards for different circumstances. Some scenarios do indeed call for special charts like visualising the Likert scale.
2. It provides alternate chart choices for some dashboards. In some chapters, the authors offer alternative approaches to take to visualise the same data to improve the dashboards. The discussions help open readers' eyes and minds to a new way to look at the same type of data.
3. It is a tool-agnostic book. Although you may have heard this one before in my other reviews, I am still including this point as I think it is an important aspect of the book. By being tool agnostic, the book becomes accessible to all tool users and allow readers to learn regardless of the tool they use. However, this also means that the readers will only know the reasons behind the design and choice of visualisations, but not specifically the "how" to get to the dashboards shown in the book.
Final Verdict: A book that will help anyone going into or is doing dashboards by not only explaining the "what" and "why" behind dashboarding, but it will also inspire them with a library of examples.