A picture is worth a thousand words, but Tufte would rather right it all down. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

This is a somewhat interesting book for the catalogue of historical visual presentations, but has little to offer someone working today. The most amazing thing about this book is its incessant use of verbiage instead of visual display.

If Tufte intended his book as irony, then bravo.

If you're looking for actual help in visual display using the tools most of us have at our disposal (not the extremely expensive software that Tufte suggests) then look elsewhere for help. I recommend:

Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery by Garr Reynolds
or
The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam

Indexed by Jessica Hagy

If you want to see great (and fun) visual displays on the web, then hit graphjam.com, zfacts.com and indexed.blogspot.com.

I would also suggest a trip to the dentist over paying for one of Tufte's seminars. Getting your teeth drilled is more pleasant than a slide show of Tufte's sculpture garden accompanied by his pedantic narcissism.

Nutshell review - This is an excellent book on chart design and the effective presentation of information. Beautifully illustrated with in-depth insight and research.

Mr. Tufte's book is like nothing I ever read before. At first I was put off by his uber self-confidence, but as I read the book further, I realized that the self-confidence was not out of place.
In an entertaining way, with splendid examples and splendid anti-examples, this book gets to the core of presenting honest and dense data and eliminating all pretense. Wait 'til you grasp the concept of "Small Multiples" and just as importantly, when not to use a graph.
Before I was finished the book, I revamped a couple of my charts and upgraded one to showing multiple variables across multiple years using "Small Multiples".

I own all of Edward Tufte's books, and regularly order his booklets for my MBA students. The reason is simple: to make good decisions, and to help others make good decisions, one must convey data as information and not simply as numbers, words, or even pictures. Business periodicals regularly violate the admonitions we learned in our introductory statistics courses, including failing to use zero as the bottom of any scale (these periodicals don't use zero in order to exaggerate changes). The reason that intelligent people convey data inappropriately is either to deliberately distort it, or because they've failed to read Tufte's books.

Once you've purchased this first book by Tufte, you will never look at charts or other graphical displays without a jaundiced eye. You will also will begin to be more honest in how you convey information to others. You will make better decisions, and you will raise the standard for other communicators and decision makers. Life and death decisions do get made on the basis of data, and not just in the sciences and medicine. Buy this book and you will have a very tough time putting it down.

Aneil Mishra
[...]

This is Tufte's best book in my opinion, maybe because this was his first book I bought. I use this book weekly. I learned many good lessons from Tufte.

Everybody should read a book like "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" and I do not mean the professionals in the field but really everybody. Tufte really opens your mind and makes you aware of the possibly malevolent or just misleading representations of data we are faced with every day on magazines, newspapers, TV and the web.

The book came in wrapped as it was described. Highly recommend for excellent amazon seller.

This was the first of three books written by Tufte on graphical displays. This book has been heralded by famous statisticians and average readers as an eloquent description of the how to and how not to make graphs. Now in its sixteenth printing, this is still a classic and the pictures tell the story along with the prose.

To put it simply, this book is one of the very best I have ever had in my hands. The subject is of utmost importance to everyone having to convey quantitative information to non-specialist audiences. The book is both very thorough in the treatment of the subject and extremely pleasant to read. You read it for fun and you learn enormously in the process. In addition, the typography and layout of the book are in perfect sync with its message. A stunning piece of work.

In this book Edward R. Tufte show us how we tend to over complicate things and how visual effects tend to distort the story that the numbers have to tell us. He introduces the concept of information to ink ratio is introduced, which is a fancy way of saying that each pixel on a chart should add information or help to it's comprehention.

The book is also a beautiful collection of historical charts, whose authors intuitively knew the importance of un-cluttered information but to which Edward Tufte adds his personal touch to make them modern works of art. My personal favorites are the "Carte figurative", which shows the progress of the Napoleonic war and the one shown on the book cover, which represents a train schedule.

Tufte points out common general flaws in presentation of data. He then goes on to examine specific conventional ways of displaying information (boxplots, scatter plots, etc.) and proposes improvements to them.

This is an approachable and informative book which will, as the title says, get you thinking about effective and clear ways to display data.

This book has been talked up by about every design professional I've seen speak at conferences across the country. I bought it to hop on the band wagon -- and it was a great purchase.

It starts as a bit of a dry read, but has some of the greatest content and insight into the theory and profession of information design. Check it out.

Buy this book, buy more copies for your bathroom and garage, take it with you to work and on vacation, petition your state to legally recognize your entering into a civil union with this book. The combination of elegance, brevity, and depth in this book has to be experienced to be believed - and beyond all this, it serves as a utterly practical manual that shares the shelf with Strunk & White. If you don't buy and read this book you will be reincarnated as an unenlightened human until you do so.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about this book.

As a graphic designer and a minimalist: I love the way this book looks and I love the graphics Tufte's team has created.

Yet: the minimalist in me also dislikes Tufte's prose, which is surprisingly un-minimalist. The text is repetitive, and although Tufte does use this effectively at times to reiterate or summarize concepts, there are far more instances where I feel the repetition is simply irritating (Tufte's poems and block-quote summaries are, to me, good examples of this).

The minimalist in me is also not fond of the nature in which Tufte presents his opinions. Tufte makes frequent use of words like "lies" and "tricks," and while I am not fond of the targets of Tufte's derision, I feel that use of these words unnecessarily and unfairly assumes that poor graphs are always the result of malicious intent. Tufte's presentation as a whole, I feel, is often unnecessarily condescending (see e.g., p 120); indeed, Tufte seems to feel that unenlightened minds somehow deserve our ridicule and contempt.

As an academically-oriented statistician: I also have mixed feelings. I give Tufte an immense amount of credit for opening a dialog about statistical graphics. And, I am grateful to him for pointing out the flaws and "wrongs" in the ways in which statistics are so often presented and suggesting ways in which these approaches can be changed. Moreover: I happen to agree tremendously with a large amount of what Tufte has to say, and often passionately so.

That said: I am puzzled by the amount of relevant concepts which are omitted from this text (or merely brushed over). Good examples include: samples versus populations, confounding, continuous versus categorical data, and exploratory graphics versus graphics presented for presentation.

For that reason: the academic and statistician in me is watchful of Tufte's role as an instructor of statistical ideas. Much of what Tufte has to say is not in fact unique or necessarily "right," and it is also not nearly close to being all there is to be said about statistical graphics (even at an introductory level). If students allow this text to be the sole contribution to their statistical education, I fear that -- without statistical intuition or knowledge to draw from -- they will not be critical statistical thinkers but blind followers. (Of course, none of this is intended to be a criticism of Tufte or Tufte's book per se...)

Those seeking a good overview of statistical graphics: keep in mind that this not strictly an instructional book. And while I wouldn't discourage you from reading or buying this text, I also wouldn't discourage you from seeking additional resources, either as an alternative or a supplement to Tufte's works. Much of the ideas supplied by Tufte here -- plus a great deal more -- can fundamentally be found in a good introductory statistical course or text, either directly or indirectly. Moreover, I would argue that there is absolutely no substitution for such an education.

The ability to communicate important information concisely, precisely, and with high fidelity is the essence of successful sales and marketing presentations. Tufte's book offers a wonderful set of guidelines and examples in the use of graphics to communicate ideas that also applies directly to creating and delivering presentations in a sales or marketing meeting or demo.

It is wonderful to see him "deconstruct" overly ornate graphics, removing unnecessary elements to render an image in its strongest possible form. Those organizations that suffer from too much "fluff" in their marketing and sales materials should contemplate applying his principles to their collateral and presentations!

This book is a real tool that should be read thoughtfully by anyone in sales, presales, or marketing, and then remain in easy access on your business bookshelf. The graphic of Napoleon's advance upon Moscow and his subsequent retreat is worth the price alone.

This book established Tufte as the authority on the subject of graphs, charts, tables, indeed the display of data by any means. The book is readable by most anyone and will add to your library and your ability to make your way intelligently and critically through the flood of statistical and graphical arguments and pitches placed before us every day.

Simply and confidently Tufte lays out the basics of the right and the wrong, the good and the bad (and occasionally ugly) regarding graphical depictions of data and information.

This book (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition )is the first and the foundation of four books by Tufte (I. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition. II. Envisioning Information. III. Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. IV. Beautiful Evidence.) that should be read in the order of publication. You will be a wiser person for the effort.

His short book, "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within", while not part of the "four volume set" is a withering attack on the ubiquitous software program, an attack based on the fact that it encourages the user to break nearly every principle that Tufte has spent the last 20 years elucidating in his books regarding the reading and the writing and presentation of well thought out and presented arguments and reports. I've read it and was convinced; PP constrains complex thought, argument, and statistical (indeed any form of) reasoning with its "bullet points", and is a very inefficient means of depicting information as well, cluttering the display space with useless clip art, huge fonts, and often misleading cookie-cutter graphs. (His satirical PP presentation of the Gettysburg Address humorously makes his points, while his analysis of a very real NASA PowerPoint slide from the decision-making meetings regarding the danger to the Space Shuttle Columbia before its destruction on re-entry makes his points in a very sobering manner.)

All this being said, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is a Great Book. In the internet age we all spend many hours per week looking at visual depictions of information. Tufte's book will make you a more critical user of nearly everything, from the newspaper, to websites, to work presentations, the sports pages, and even your car's speedometer and other gauges. It is the foundation to all of his published work from the last two decades.

Buy this book!

This book fuses mathematical information with art to tell the underlying story and get your message across to the viewer. I would reccommend it to anyone responsible for conveying objective information to others.

This book was very nicely laid out, and the ideas for presenting were good. Sometimes it was a little hard to follow because it rambled a little. But I did get some good pointers that I can use to visualize my data.

The book strikes a good balance between major concepts and academic nitty-gritty.

Tufte presents an examination of a frankly under-esteemed method of data analysis that can be accurately described as passionate. As a Behavioural Scientist trained in sophisticated methods of statistical analysis, I previously was arrogantly inclined to regard charts and graphs as simplistic and naive approaches to data interpretation. However, I now apprehend the undeniable utility of graphical representation, and have acquired a fascination with the field through Tufte's contagious enthusiasm.

If you work with data of any form, it is IMPERATIVE that you read this book.

An interesting and well presented book, but very specialized.

The Visual Diplay of Quantitative Information is not exactly a how-to book, in that it won't give you step by step instructions on how to create charts. Rather Tufte shows us principles of good design, principles of bad design (i.e. how people lie with graphics) all accompanied by many inspirational examples.

His examples strike us with their beauty and economy and show us how picturing data makes a huge difference in how effectively and quickly we understand it. Looking at Mivart's chart of Napoleon's march on Moscow, or the Salyut 6 hand drawn mission schedule, or a Japanese train schedule can only make a geek like me gush out "Way cool!".

I find it gratifying that Tufte takes so many examples from Japan, where I live. The Japanese are often accused of simply working with other people's ideas. This is naive and the Visual Diplay of Quantitative Information provides an excellent counterexample of the Japanese being sophisticated leaders in a creative endeavor.

Vincent Poirier, Tokyo

I was one of those chart-makers who used color just because I could, even when it was unnecessary or even inappropriate. This book changed the way I looked at graph-making. His concepts of data per unit of ink (which should be maximized), and trying to make each droplet of ink convey something useful were extremely helpful, as were his suggestions to minimize distractions and phony 3-d effects.

This, and his second book, "Envisioning Information" are must-reads for anyone designing computer statistical tools (like I was) or simply trying to convert raw data into meaningful graphs, maps, etc.

Very good book. I really enjoyed the quality of graphs and interpretion of them. Tufte gives practical guidelines and observations about graphs and graph-making.

Tufte's work is absolutely essential for everyone in the business of creating or consuming Information, which is to say, Everyone. Although his book is extremely beautiful, some of the most essential advice is so crystal-clear that even the Graphically Challenged will gain from reading it.
Although readers will also get a lot out of Tufte's other two books, "Envisioning Information" and "Visual Explanations", there is no question that this is the book that had the largest impact, and which contains the most original thinking. This book was like a bucket of cold water in the face of established thinking regarding Graphic Design and the reporting of Information.

Pros:
1. This book is considered by some one of the key books in this field
2. It has some great observations on how to detects "lies" within charts
3. General advices are sound (if a bit obvious): don't use irrelevant marks, shades and hatches; do plot information...
4. Some interesting information on history of graphs

Cons:
1. The book is dated. This is the 2001 edition but I am not sure how much updating has happened since the late 1980s.
2. Some proposed techniques are peculiar; the author goes way too far into removing what he considers redundant lines: he has a new box plot and a new way to do bar charts that (although contain the same information from a mathematical point of view) will just loose the audience focus, since the audience will spend attention into puzzling out the new graph
3. The book is extremely idiosyncratic on what types of charts it covers, and you are likely not find anything of interest to you besides the general advice

This is absolutely one of the books that should be proudly displayed on everyone researcher's bookshelf: it details a usable theory of data graphics, provides an excellent rogue's gallery of misleading figures, and is the kind of well-designed book that we need to see more of.

The only thing I can find about this to complain about is the fact that the majority of what Tufte presents as new and better methods for presenting or refining old styles of plots CANNOT be found in modern graphing packages.

In truth, this is wholly an excellent book for anyone that has to deal with graphs. If you have ever been interested in a graph, or have ever been fascinated by data, get a copy of this book. It won't disappoint.

I recieved this book along with the most excellent (almost a companion book) Envisioning Information, from my CEO. Since I work a lot with numbers and he had been stressing the importance of presenting data clearly and concisely.

I feel that, this book, more than being a guide to creating beautiful charts is a book to appreciate charts. The book mroe hopes that we will do the right thing rather than instructing us how to do the right thing.

If you have ever wondered how statisticians communicated data before Excel then you've found the right book to settle your curiosity. For some this may be a seaside read, but for me it is a great coffee table companion. I've learned something new every day for the last couple of months. This won't make an artist out of anyone, but it will guide you through the thought process of choosing appropriate methods to convey data.

Very good book, explained everything in black and white, really cant go wrong!

I am a technical writer whose graphic skills are underdeveloped so I am learning more about graphic design. First, the contents of this books are physically beautiful. Second, Tufte explains how he thinks about design, establishing its importance and demystifying it at the same time. Third, the book helped me to feel less intimidated by thinking visually about the presentation of information. Finally, the book opened up, even if ever-so-sligthly, other modes of experiencing reality, for this left-brained person.

This is a book that everybody who handles data, whether simple and complex, should read. And if he/she is in the position of influence, he should get other members of his team to read it and, more importantly, to practice it.

Though some of the examples of computer graphics are dated, the principles still resonate. This book was recommended to me in the late 80's and is still the major influence in how I think about presenting data. Tufte writes with quick wit and tremendous examples.

Buy the book in spite of the title - it belongs on every professional's bookcase.

I have heard this book described as a really good coffee-table book. It's content, while often technical and very much focused on the theory of graphs and diagrams and data and information, very practically demonstrates the impact of how quantitative information is visually presented, and shows many alternatives that are quantum improvements on the originals. It's easy to draw out the principles that Tufte demonstrates, and to apply them to your own work.

The book's examples are drawn from many interesting areas such as the New York State Budget, train schedule graphs, irrigation maps of 1972, heights of college students, the price of crude oil and the thermal conductivity of tungsten. Through these case studies, Tufte makes conscious for the reader the way in which humans read visual information and how poorly the majority of our visual information is designed in respect of this.

It has greatly influenced the work I do in helping people design reports of organisational performance information, how they choose and format charts in particular. I enthusiastically recommend this book to anyone who regularly reports or presents data and information to others to assist their decision making.

If you buy just one of Edward Tufte's three wonderful books on good graphical practice (soon to be four, incidentally: watch out for Beautiful Evidence, expected later this year), then it has to be this one, because it is here that he sets out the principles that underlie all of his later work. It is a book that everyone who uses graphs for displaying information needs to read and read again. Every page contains something of interest and importance, and sometimes something entertaining as well.

So, what are these principles that define a good graphic? First of all, the presentation must be honest. So far as deliberate dishonesty is concerned this is obvious, but often graphical dishonesty results from incompetence rather than bad intentions. A frequent error of this kind is to vary the linear dimensions of little drawings intended to represent the relative magnitudes of different things. It is common, for example, when one quantity has double the magnitude of another to represent this with a drawing that not only has double the length but also double the width of the other, forgetting that this means that it has four times the area. In more elaborate illustrations where the drawings imply three dimensions, i.e. depth as well as length and width, doubling the linear size implies multiplying the volume by eight.

To this point Tufte's arguments are surely uncontroversial, but he goes on to discuss other principles that excellent graphics display and bad ones do not, and here he may part company with some of his readers. He dislikes meaningless decoration -- flourishes intended to make "dry statistics" more interesting. However, as he rightly says, if the statistics are not interesting in the first place one should not be presenting them, and if they are interesting they don't need decoration to make them more so. Another point -- related to this one, but more extended -- is that good graphics maximize what he calls data ink: as far as possible all of the ink used in printing the graphic should be conveying information about the data. Grids, scale measures, frames and so on should be kept to a minimum and should never be allowed to overwhelm the data they are supporting. A good graphic should be clear, but at the same time contain many details that constantly call the attention back.

The book is fairly repetitive, as certain examples recur during the course of reading it. However, this is deliberate, and probably essential. When we see a truly excellent graphic for the first time, such as the summary of New York City's weather in 1980, which appears in Chapter 1, we can see immediately that it is excellent, but it is less evident what makes it excellent. To understand this we need to have the various features explained and contrasted with some of the truly horrible examples that Tufte also provides: the very large quantity of real information contained in a small space, the simultaneous comparison of numerous different variables, the intelligent (and not garish) use of shading, the explanatory labels within the graphic, and so on. Convincing the reader that all this is desirable, and that gratuitous shading, meaningless bright colours, and so on, are not, requires a leisurely pace and some repetition. Many readers simply don't get it even after it has been explained, and the continued frequency of really bad graphics underlines the necessity of Tufte's books.