Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics

What sets this book apart from most other books on data visualization (and there are quite a few!) is that Nathan Yau focuses strongly on the craft skills of making visualizations. He presents a range of tools and techniques that are, if not timeless, then at least reasonably useful and relevant even seven years after initial publication. The instructions on how to create effective visualizations are structured according to visualization purposes -- patterns, relationships, differences and so on -- and consistently delivered in a way that inspires own experimentation.

Nice book on data visualization, but could have been much shorter, and contained much less code. We need a book written like this book that shares less about the how to the obtain the data and more on the thinking about and visualizing the data.

An attractive book. You can learn several things from it, but I don't think you're going to pick up Python or Adobe Illustrator or any Statistics from it.