Reddit reviews Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information

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.

Or you can just read his PhD thesis, Computational Information Design, which covers pretty much all of the same conceptual topics but doesn't go into the technical aspects of project development as much. Other essential reading would be Semiology of Graphics by Jacques Bertin, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte, and Visual Complexity by Manuel Lima.