New book: “Head First Data Analysis”

There’s a whole world of data out there, and it’s your job to make sense of it all. Where to begin? Head First Data Analysis helps you organize your data in Excel or Open Office, take it further with R, find meaningful patterns with scatterplots and histograms, draw conclusions using heuristics, predict the future by experimenting and testing hypotheses, and display findings with clear visualizations.

Whether you’re a product developer researching the market viability of a new product or service, a marketing manager gauging or predicting the effectiveness of a campaign, a salesperson who needs data to support product presentations, or a lone entrepreneur responsible for all of these data-intensive functions and more, the unique approach in Head First Data Analysis is by far the most efficient way to learn what you need to know to convert raw data into a vital business tool.

With the help of this book, you’ll learn how to:

• Determine which data sources to use for collecting information
• Assess data quality and distinguish signal from noise
• Build basic data models to illuminate patterns, and assimilate new information into the models
• Cope with ambiguous information
• Design experiments to test hypotheses and draw conclusions
• Use segmentation to organize your data within discrete market groups
• Visualize data distributions to reveal new relationships and persuade others
• Predict the future with sampling and probability models
• Clean your data to make it useful
• Communicate the results of your analysis to your audience.

Using the latest research in cognitive science and learning theory to craft a multi-sensory learning experience, Head First Data Analysis uses a visually rich format designed for the way your brain works, not a text-heavy approach that puts you to sleep.