One of the main questions when anyone wants to start learning Tableau is: where I should start? Maybe the fastest and easiest answer will be to recommend you to have a look to the Tableau Help website where you can find the +1200 page user manual, but I’m sure half of you will run scared if my only suggestion was to read it to be able to start with your visualizations and analysis. However, I will recommend you to bookmark that webpage. It will be more helpful than you expected after your first visualizations. But to help us improving our Tableau and visualization skills, The Information Lab has provide for the students a very complete variety of books available in the Data School library. I will show you in this post the books available in the library.

If you are completely new to the Tableau world, my first recommendation will be to start with the books focused on learning Tableau, which contain different examples and even datasets available to download in the publisher websites and follow the exercises (in the Learning Tableau book for example).

Learning Tableau and Tableau your Data could be the best options to initiate yourself in the Tableau World, and here you can find links to each of these books in the Amazon Store:

• Learning Tableau by Joshua Milligan.
• Tableau Your Data!: Fast and Easy Visual Analysis with Tableau Software by Daniel G. Murray.
• Communicating Data with Tableau by Ben Jones.
• Tableau Dashboard Coookbook by Jennifer Jane Stirrup.

These books will help you to understand how Tableau works and learn basic and advance methods to visualize data with the software.

But it’s not all about learning Tableau, and as you get more familiar with the software you will discover that the ability to make good visualization decisions and using the appropriate type of graph it’s essential to help people making good business decisions, and in the Data School we also have some of the best books on these issues based on the experience of The Information Lab coaches team.

In my opinion, Now You See It by Stephen Few it’s the best option to start with, but of course feel free to have a look at each book in Amazon:

• Now You See It by Stephen Few.
• Visualizing Data by William S. Cleveland.
• Turning Numbers into Knowledge: Mastering the Art of Problem Solving by Jonathan G. Koomey.
• Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication by Zach Gemignani.
• Data Points: Visualization That Means Something by Nathan Yau.
• The Functional Art: An Introduction to Information Graphics and Visualization by Alberto Cairo

And last but not least, you will find that having a deeper knowledge of general visualization design to enhance the impact of your dashboards it’s also as important as choosing the appropriate graph or knowing how to use the software. Here are the books recommended to improve your skills in this area.

As you can see, Stephen Few is one of the must read authors in this topic:

• Signal by Stephen Few.
• Information Dashboard Design by Stephen Few.
• Envisioning Information by Edward R. Tufte.
• Show Me the Numbers by Stephen Few.

Do you know of any essential book that we should include in the Data School library?