Tufte course worth the cost?
viggity: 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/) 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.