Rating: 
Summary: Useful, insightful, but same as 1983 edition
Review: Quite insightful, especially the historic perspective. The only difference between the newer and 1983 edition is color is added to a few of the charts.
Rating: 
Summary: I'd give it 6 stars if they'd let me....
Review: Instead I give this book regularly to my students & wish to goodness that more of my colleagues had copies. From the opening pages -where Tufte gives us 4 data sets that are statistically indistinguishable but graphicly at different points of the compass- through the beautifully rendered examples of classical and modern examples of meaningful graphics & "chartjunk" Tufte serves as a wry, witty, and informative guide to the perils & joys of informing or confusing an audience with charts and graphs.
Although in some ways a polemic against the misuse of graphical techniques, Tufte never loses his sense of humor & gives us plenty of really GOOD examples as well as a harsh deconstruction of some truly horrendous images. While this, the first in what has become a series, predates the muddy dawn of computer graphical "presentations" the basic principles outlined in its pages are every bit as applicable to the PowerPoint generation as they were to transparencies & posters. Buy it. read it Use it.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't bother with this book
Review: I heard a lot of good things about Edward Tufte's books, and was told he was THE expert on graphics. When I was asked to read this book for work, I eagerly agreed and ordered it straight away. Now I'm sorry I wasted my time. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is poorly organized, and Tufte contradicts himself in many places. He includes a quote from E. B. White recommending that writers trust in their readers' intelligence, yet he does not. Everything is broken down bit by bit so that the intelligent reader must skim over half the content of the book to avoid wasting his or her time. While the ideas behind the book are good, the voice is condescending and irritating. In addition, the bizarre layout of the book is heavily unbalanced; some pages have several inches of white space all the way down the right hand side of the page, while others are so full of text and graphics that it is difficult to tell to what the citations refer, giving the page a jumbled, disorganized appearance. This is disappointing; Tufte says in the introduction that he controlled the book's layout, yet he, an expert in the art of visual display, produces an unblanced and jumbled display? I am sorry I bothered reading this book, and would urge others to avoid it.
Rating:
Summary: The essential guide to avoiding graphical lies
Review: This book, and the two companion volumes ("Envisioning Information" and "Visual Explanations") are must-haves for anyone who is in the business or producing or interpretingstatistical information. Tufte starts with a simple proposition: graphs and graphics that represent statistical data should tell the truth. It's amazing how often designers of such graphics miss this basic point. Tufte clearly and entertainingly elucidates the most common "graphical lies" and how to avoid them. Read this book and you'll never look at a newspaper or presentation graphics the same way again -- you'll be left wondering if the author *intended* to lie about what the data were saying, or if he/she just didn't know any better. Another reviewer claimed that this book talks about how to make graphics accurate, not beautiful. He's right in some sense, but who cares? There are a million books on how to make "pretty" graphical displays, but precious few on how to make useful ones. These books are they.
Rating:
Summary: Superb Introduction to Quantitative Information Display
Review: Prof. Tufte uses an excellent assortment of charts and graphics to illustrate his points. I found this book to be a quick read; and one I could return to for years to come, as the principles he describes are quite applicable to web site design. I would recommend this book, in fact, I was impressed enough to sign up for the design seminar.
Rating:
Summary: I'd give it 6 stars if they'd let me....
Review: Instead I give this book regularly to my students & wish to goodness that more of my colleagues had copies. From the opening pages -where Tufte gives us 4 data sets that are statistically indistinguishable but graphicly at different points of the compass- through the beautifully rendered examples of classical and modern examples of meaningful graphics & "chartjunk" Tufte serves as a wry, witty, and informative guide to the perils & joys of informing or confusing an audience with charts and graphs.
Although in some ways a polemic against the misuse of graphical techniques, Tufte never loses his sense of humor & gives us plenty of really GOOD examples as well as a harsh deconstruction of some truly horrendous images. While this, the first in what has become a series, predates the muddy dawn of computer graphical "presentations" the basic principles outlined in its pages are every bit as applicable to the PowerPoint generation as they were to transparencies & posters. Buy it. read it Use it.
Rating:
Summary: Sets the stage for all information architects
Review: This book will teach you some basics on how to most effectively present quantitative information using various sorts of graphs and charts. Afterwards you will know how and why you should get rid of chart junk (gridlines, tick marks, ornaments, etc.) or alternatively using some of the examples on bad design presented, you will see how to manipulate your audience using the "Lie Factor". Actually the advice given in this book could easily fit within just one piece of paper, but then: This book is simply beautiful. It is state of the art for printed books, you almost feel a passion for it. Mr. Tufte takes his own medicine: No words in this book are superfluous. Illustrations and examples are carefully selected and reprinted with the utmost care. It takes no more than some hours to read the book, but afterwards you can use more than just a few hours to study the examples of timeless graphic displays. The only reason why this book is short of five stars is the following: Mr. Tufte uses quite some space providing statistics about charts found in different publications (chart junk percentages, lie factor. Personally I find this information fairly irrelevant and would have preferred more examples of chart remakes. However this book is definately still a MUST have!
Rating: 
Summary: Very Short on Substance; Has Essentially Only A Single Point
Review: Other reviewers have mentioned a few negatives. To me, these mostly boil down to short-on-substance problems. The author is a bit pompous -- which wouldn't matter that much if he had a lot to say. Alas, he does not. In essence, the author makes one -- and only one! -- point with the whole book: eliminate "chart junk" (e.g. 3-D effect bars, etc). He is manically obsessive-compulsive about this point so that he takes it to extremes -- get this: computing "data ink" to "junk ink" ratios he even eliminates the axis line (to increase the ratio). While he's at it, just put tics and only where data are (thus giving marginal distributions of x and y) -- cute idea and it does increase "info"-to-junk ink to the max, but these ideas are nearly absurd extremes. If you really want to learn new techniques and real-value PRINCIPLES get William Cleveland's "Elements of Graphing Data" (original or revised). Don't be put off by publication date -- Cleveland's book is a superbly enjoyable read with eminently useful ideas. I've used principles from Clevelend's book to great effect. I've been graphing for decades, but with Cleveland's book I recently made a very large jump in the quality of my graphical communication. Skip the low-on-substance, one-note Tufte and go for the full-of-substance, emminently useful Cleveland.
Rating:
Summary: Case in point
Review: This is a great book for anyone (like me) who works in the PowerPoint-driven business world who wants to deliver more effective presentations that will be appreciated by fewer than one out of every ten viewers. Notice that whomever scanned this book for the Amazon.com "Look Inside" feature certainly didn't read it. Maybe they'd have included a page or two other than the TOC and index.
Rating:
Summary: The best for data display; missing how to tie displays in
Review: Tufte isn't considered the master of this field for nothing; this work debunks a lot of common practices in data display, including use of color, composition of images, and the importance of scales and labels. An excellent grounding is provided in theory about how to effectively present quantitative data, but the practical advice and examples are also comprehensive. The only thing this book was missing for me was how to tie in data display with the rest of a writing -- how to best visually display your data near descriptive text, but get the flow right so that readers will get the most value from it. Of course, you can get some of that information by osmosis merely by reading his beautifully-composed book.
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