Reddit reviews Beautiful Visualization: Looking at Data through the Eyes of Experts (Theory in Practice)

This is a fairly useful review that I believe is available via google scholar for free: Wainer, H., & Thissen, D. (1981). Graphical data analysis. Annual review of psychology, 32, 191–241.

Tufte is useful for a historical overview and for inspiration, but he has a particular style that doesn't necessarily match up with the way that you or your audience think.

Hadley Wickham developed ggplot2 and his site is a good place to start browsing for guides to using it.

There's a pretty good o'reilly book on visualization as well, and Stephen Few's book does a really good job of enumerating the various ways you can express trends in data.

I'm reading a book called Beautiful Visualization that I strongly recommend.

http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Visualization-Looking-through-Practice/dp/1449379869

Think about any time someone tells a story with stats. Is it misleading? How could it be more objective. What are the trade offs? How could people misinterpret your visual?

Beautiful Visualisation Here

O'Reilly Designing Interfaces Here

I would check out Ben Fry's book first.

Then Beautiful Visualization.

There is another good McCandless eyecandy.

Manuel Lima did an amazing book on network visualization with excellent essays from other people. Visual Complexity. Network vis is very difficult and if you want to "game up" understanding the taxonomy he built for network vis will give you a real perspective on the taxonomy in other types of vis.

There are things outside of the "take data and render visualization" world that are critical to data vis, imo. For moving data vis, start with the godfather, Muybridge

And look way way back for the long human history of data vis in cartography with stuff like Cartographia.

Hope to see some more books and discvoer a reading list on this thread! Great idea for a post.