How to Make a Thematic Map

How to Make a US County Thematic Map Using Free Tools | FlowingData

This is a great worked example of both scraping data and turning it into a nice visualization.

These are very important tools you should know.

Discuss: 1) Why learn Python when you could just type the data into a spreadsheet? 2) R does maps too. Which is better? 3) GIS? See Grass for an open source GIS system.

20 Useful Visualization Libraries

20 Useful Visualization Libraries | A Beautiful WWW

Some of these are linked under Vis Resources here, but others are not and browsing through them provides lots of stimulation as well as potential tools you might want to know and use.