I ordered a bunch of books recently. I really need to get on reading all these books instead of buying more. Here’s one I just got today. I’ve been working on a new health tool at work and need to revamp its data visualization. I’ve been looking at this book for a while but decided this was a fine occasion to make this purchase.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Edward Tufte is a data visualizations god. He takes real solid human factors and psychological research and turns data visualization into a hard science. His books are exceptional in content as well as actual print and materials quality. The images he packs in his books are nothing but aggregations of data and concepts, but the result is beautiful works of art. This is his first legendary book attacking the raw mechanics of graphing. I have his next two books, Envisioing Information and Visual Explanations, as well.

On a related note, check out Junk Charts, an information visualizations blog. They take dava visualizations and redo them much nicer and is a great way to see some data visualization transformations in action.