Sparklines are good. The Book the text came from is better. The three previous books and "Beautiful Evidence" stand next to Knuth in my estimation. For Perl fans out there check out CD-Graph-Sparklines on CPAN.

John Resig had a JS library for making these dynamically using the Canvas element. The project page is: http://ejohn.org/projects/jspark/

It doesn't seem to work in Safari 2 though. Looks fine in FF2.

Actually, it works in Opera, Safari, Firefox and in Internet Explorer (using the excanvas). Its still evolving a bit, and I hope to add more statistical analysis to it, but its a bit fun.

Cool, one of these days I will have a computer with IE :).

Geoffrey Grosenbach has a Ruby library for generating Sparklines: http://nubyonrails.com/articles/2005/07/28/sparklines-graph-...

And, as usual, Why the Lucky Stiff has a wacky minimalist one: http://redhanded.hobix.com/inspect/sparklinesForMinimalists....

I was just thinking how nice it would be to see these sorts of graphs in academic papers. Most papers already have the habit of including stdev in () next to means but it would be nice to see these sorts of graphs for things like learning curves.