4 ms·

Ask HN: Tufte course worth the cost?

• mechanical_fish 18y ago
  My wife took this course and adored it. I just bought all the books, so I don't know. The books are very nice, as you may already know. I will say that owning all the books already makes me more hesitant to take the course, though by all accounts Tufte is a great presenter.
• yan 18y ago
  I am taking it in October in DC. My manager took it and loved it. I saw Tufte's books on her desk and started ranting on about how much I love his work and asked if she was a `fan' as well. Turns out she just took the course because other management were too, but she loved it as well.
• bisceglie 18y ago
  The course is definitely worth it. Tufte is a great speaker, and watching how he presents ideas, evidence, etc is a valuable experience. The books are supplemental to the talk, and they end up feeling more like development materials to be explored in greater depth... highly recommended.
• xg 18y ago
  I attended the Tufte course a few years ago and it was fantastic. I enumerate the following reasons: 1. The 4 books alone are worth almost $200 2. He's one of the most engaging speakers you'll ever see: you're ability to present will improve. 3. Book porn. He brings antique copies of Galileo and shows them off. 4. Inspiration.
• viggity 18y ago
  I went and saw him in Minneapolis in June and I was incredibly disappointed. His books have good info, but I thought is talk was bad. He talked a lot about presentations which I wasn't really there for, I wanted info on how to make my informational graphics better. It seemed like the majority of the people there where managerial types, not developers/designers so I think he skewed his topic for their needs. He also did a poor job at backing up his points, thats not to say they weren't true, its just that he would make an assertion and count on dogma to validate it. It was too cargo-cult for me. The other three developers/BA's I went with thought the same. (Especially when Tufte started showing pictures of his bizarre metal sculptures that had nothing to do with visualizing information). If you're a developer and you want specific details in how to make your applications better, I'd highly recommend Ben Fry's Dissertation. (http://benfry.com/phd/ http://benfry.com/phd/) Its 150 pages, but the text is pretty light and he is very detailed in how you can use color, space, animation, spatial relations to make your data easier to understand. The dissertation doesn't fail to impress, plus its 100% free. Ben is the guy behind the Processing language, which is essentially a DSL for info graphics, really cool stuff, even if it is a wrapper around Java.