QuickStart Guide to (Ultra-)High Performance Visualizations

Mixed feelings. The good parts are genuinely good; the rest is forgettable.

There is a particular kind of technical book that is dense without being difficult, and this is one of them. The code samples assume a particular environment, which took a bit of fiddling to get running properly. I particularly liked the way the author builds up from simple cases before introducing the harder material. It is denser than the page count suggests, and I found myself slowing down around the middle. Borrow it first if you can, or at least check the table of contents carefully before buying.

Very good, with a few caveats. The core material is strong.

A colleague recommended this and I can see why. It does something that few technical books manage: it respects the reader's time. I appreciated the honesty about what the book does not cover — it saved me from expecting things that were not there. Some of the material is available elsewhere, but rarely presented this clearly. A few of the examples could be more realistic, but the underlying points come across clearly. Four stars, and I suspect a second edition could easily push it to five.