Best Data Analysis Books – For the Data Lover in All of Us

It's important that we make this transformation, because of what Clayton Christensen calls "the innovator's dilemma," where people who invent something are usually the last ones to see past it, and we certainly don't want to be left behind.

Steve Jobs

Founder/Apple

Gladwell is not the first person to come up with the 10,000 hour rule. Nor is he the first person to document what it takes to become the best in the world at something.

But his stories are so great as he explains these deep concepts.

How did the Beatles become the best? Why are professional hockey players born in January, February and March?

And so on.

James Altucher

Founder/StockPickr

This book has everything: new ideas, bold insights, entertaining history and convincing analysis. Not to be missed by anyone who wants to understand how ideas change the world.

Daniel Kahneman

Nobel Prize Winner, Author

The book is new (2017) and growthhacking is a real trend right now.

Kyrylo Taranenko

Head of Marketing/Y-Productive

Reid Hoffman

CEO/LinkedIn

Buffett said that Security Analysis, another groundbreaking work of Graham's, had given him a road map for investing that he has been following for 57 years.

Warren Buffett

CEO/Berkshire Hathaway

I love this book because it provides some practical case studies about the behaviors that allow certain individuals, teams, and companies to excel that you can then apply to your own personal life and career.

Joseph Liu

Career Consultant & Host/Career Relaunch Podcast

From the very first page I was consumed with an overwhelming imperative: everyone needs to read this book as an act of digital self-defense. With tremendous lucidity and moral courage, Zuboff demonstrates not only how our minds are being mined for data but also how they are being rapidly and radically changed in the process. The hour is late and much has been lost already—but as we learn in these indispensable pages, there is still hope for emancipation.

Naomi Klein

Author

Uwe Reinhardt was the moral conscience of our health care system, reminding us with evidence, clarity, and stand-up act humor how it is failing. He was joined in this enterprise by another great health care expert, his wife Mei Cheng. Every health care group craved Reinhardt as their keynote speaker and felt more virtuous after he berated them about the many ways in which they were failing. But he did not want adulation; he wanted things to change. By reading this powerful book and making something in the health system better, we can all honor his legacy.

Drew Altman

President & CEO/Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation

There’s so much hype out there about ‘big data,’ and in my work at Wired and now at Iodine I’ve been responsible for some share of it. Lohr’s book thankfully discerns the real power — and limitations — of data-driven decisions. He finds the humanity in the subject, and makes a strong case that data is only going to be an ever-more powerful force in business and society, for good and ill.

Thomas Goetz

Co-founder/Iodine

I work in digital marketing so I would [recommend]: [...] Web Analytics: An Hour A Day and Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaushik.

Raluca Radu

Owner/MTH Digital

A few books had affected how I run the company [...] Play Bigger.

Mikhail Dubov

Founder & CEO/Chattermill

The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing by Thomas T. Nagle: Why? Because pricing is hard!

Garrett Moon

CEO & Co-Founder/CoSchedule

Recommended by Raluca Radu (Owner/MTH Digital)

Source: Interview with Raluca Radu, owner of MTH Digital

The best intuition builder in both statitics and econometrics. I have been reading the various editions throught my career. Please, keep updating it, Peter Kennedy!

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Flaneur

From this book I realized you could think you understood a chess position, but then later learn you didn’t really understand it at all. A huge lesson, one I learned again and to a higher degree when high-quality chess computers came along. Most of the commentariat on economic and social affairs could use a reminder on this one. This book also taught me that you learn by doing — trying to solve actual problems — not so much from pure reading. Or the two in close conjunction. It may be the distortions of memory, but still I feel this is one of the best books I ever have read. Hail the Soviet training system!

Tyler Cowen

Founder/Marginal Revolution University

One of Smil’s books makes my list of favorites pretty much every year. This time it’s his look at the world’s use of materials, from silicon to wood to plastic and cement. If anyone tries to tell you we’re using fewer materials, send him this book. With his usual skepticism and his love of data, Smil shows how our ability to make things with less material—say, soda cans that need less aluminum—makes them cheaper, which actually encourages more production. We’re using more stuff than ever.

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

Options Volatility Trading by Adam Warner also had a major impact on me because I have always been into investing and until this book I never quite understood the specific strategies behind making money when the market goes up OR down. I was familiar with short selling but wanted to explore option contracts so right after college a good friend gave me this book. I read it immediately and began putting what I learned into practice.

James Murphy

Marketing Manager/Live Nation

The most troubling reading I did on vacation was Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, by two sociologists, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, who examine the evidence on what college students actually learn. I was surprised how little data there is on this important question. Even more disturbing, the data cited by the authors indicates that students may not learn very much. In their first two years of college, many U.S. college students advance very little in important skills like critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing.

I was really surprised to read that. The data shows that students today spend much less time actually studying, and they take less rigorous courses, most of which don’t require them to do much writing, for example. And yet even so, many students do not complete their degrees. Graduation rates from U.S. colleges are much lower than in many other countries. What’s going on in higher educationis a topic I care a lot about, and I basically agree with the authors’ findings that we have a real problem. I plan to take a deeper dive into this topic with a full review of Academically Adrift, which I’ll post in a few weeks.

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

Recommended by Barack Obama (Former USA President)

Source: Every book Barack Obama has recommended during his presidency

Recommended by Bogdana Butnar (Head of Strategy/Poke)

Source: Bogdana Butnar - The Ultimate Books to Read List

A more centric version of Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe (or the other way around).

Bobby Voicu

Founder/the CEO Library

This year’s fierce election battle prompted me to pick up this 2014 book, by an Oxford University scholar who has studied political leadership—good, bad, and ugly—for more than 50 years. Brown shows that the leaders who make the biggest contributions to history and humanity generally are not the ones we perceive to be “strong leaders.” Instead, they tend to be the ones who collaborate, delegate, and negotiate—and recognize that no one person can or should have all the answers. Brown could not have predicted how resonant his book would become in 2016.

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

Recommended by Tony Robbins on page 215 of Tools of Titans

Tony Robbins

Entrepreneur & Life Coach

Recommended by Barack Obama (Former USA President)

Source: Every book Barack Obama has recommended during his presidency

The book I read many times already is Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Don’t say it’s pretentious. It is beautiful. Some even say it’s poetry. I am far from understanding his complicated genius, but I think I’ve learned how to read it and I think I’ll never stop going back to it.

Sonia Micu

Founder/NALU

Another book by Hackworth called Steal My Soldier’s Heart [...] Again, it’s not always clear that oh, here’s the leadership principle; here’s what you should be doing. No, it’s not always clear like that. But when you understand what people are going through emotionally and you start to get a glimpse at human nature and how people react in certain situations and how their egos flare up, that’s what makes these books good. Because it gives you a frame of reference.

Jocko Willink

Founder/Echelon Front

All over the world, elite institutions from governments to media to academia are losing their authority and monopoly control of information to dynamic amateurs and the broader public. This book, until now only in samizdat (and Kindle) form, has been my #1 handout for the last several years to anyone seeking to understand this unfolding shift in power from hierarchies to networks in the age of the Internet.

Marc Andreessen

Co-Founder/Andreessen Horowitz

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

The Age of Migration has been the main textbook for migration studies since it first appeared in 1993; I have relied on it both as a resource for my own research and a text for my upper-division undergraduate and graduate courses on the politics of immigration. The fifth edition continues the excellent coverage of migration theories and history, the politics of immigration, and issues such as race and ethnicity, while bringing in new material on topics like the impact of climate change. The authors are to be commended for addressing critical issues in a time of global change.

Terri E. Givens

PhD/Department of Government,University of Texas at Austin

Recommended by Leah Lizarondo (Co-Founder/412 Food Rescue)

Source: Leah Lizarondo, Food Waste Fighter, Talks About the Pleasures of Reading Fiction

Until I read this book, Buzzati's "Il deserto dei tartari" was my favorite novel, perhaps my only novel, the only one I cared to keep re-reading through life. This is, remarkably a very similar story about the antichamber of anticipation (rather than "the antichamber of hope" as I called Buzzati's book), but written in a much finer language, by a real writer (Buzzati was a journalist, which made his prose more functional) ; the style is lapidary with remarkable precision; it has texture, wealth of details, and creates a mesmerizing atmosphere. Once you enter it, you are stuck there. I kept telling myself while reading it: "this is the book". It suddenly replaced the "deserto".

A few caveats/comments. First, I read it in the original French Le Rivage des Syrtes (French Edition), not in this English translation, but I doubt that the translator can mess up such a fine style and the imagery. Second, the blurb says Gracq received the Goncourt prize for it. Julien Gracq REFUSED the Goncourt, he despised the Parisian literary circles and by 1951 decided to stay in the margin. He stuck to his publisher José Corti rather than switch to the fancy Gallimard after his success (as Proust did) (or other publishing houses for the fakes and the selfpromoters). Third, this book came out a few years after Buzzati's "deserto", but before Buzzati was translated into French. I wonder if Gracq had heard of the "deserto"; the coincidence is too strong to be ignored.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Flaneur

The title essay in this book is peerless and amazing. The rest of the essays, which talk about Haley’s unusual approach to psychotherapy are also quite good. If you’ve gone to therapy, are thinking about going to therapy, or know someone going to therapy, this book is a must-read.

Ryan Holiday

Founder/Brass Check