Chambers J.M., Cleveland W.S., Kleiner B., Tukey P.A. Graphical Methods for Data Analysis

Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, 1983. — 407 p. — ISBN: 0871504138, 053498052X.This book is an excellent introductory book to graphical data analysis. If you are an advanced reader, this book is a good one to have lying around for reference (especially since it costs so little and does not take up much space). The book relies heavily on the use of S-PLUS, a grapical and statistical analysis program. One thing that this text lacks is quantity of examples. The text is also lacking in that there is a lot of material in simple paragraph format rather than broken down steps of procedures. However, the quality of the examples that are included is very high and they usually encompass theoretical concepts completely. With that said, this book covers a wide variety of methods of analysis ranging from simple histograms to advanced data transformation and also touches on a bit of probability.
This book is certainly of its time, and the rapid development of computer graphical tools since publication has meant that there are options for data exploration which were unachievable at the time of writing. Nevertheless, it makes for an excellent primer for how to think about exploring data and why various graphical approaches make sense before get caught up in the details of how to finesse your chart of choice. It is one of the classics in the field of data visualization.