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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.)<br><br>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.<br><br>Buy this book!