Customer Rating: 
Summary: What a gem - but not your first design book
Comment: Tufte's series on visualization will surely go down as classics. He's readable, he's right, and he's engaging.
The only thing is, as pretty and as well-founded the book is in certain principles, it's my opinion that... that the average reader doesn't understand design problems enough that this book will present anything new.
Meaning, the book is so intuitive, that, it seems pointless anyone would ever have to write a beautiful book like this -- *UNLESS* you have been stymied over and over again by mudglobs of creative ad hoc-kery and ad-hoc functionality, or, if you have been victimized by the unfunctional sheen of superglossy animated 3-d search engines (data visualizations, etc).
Here's maybe the test -- if the price tag of this book seems excessive, you haven't been slogging through enough terrible textbooks to see what a light and airy gem of fresh... >sigh< air this book is.
Otherwise - buy the Tufte series all at once, and see if you can't save bucks on the group discount.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Not a text book but a knowledgeable friend
Comment: Visual Explanations is not a usual book. It is like a knowledgeable friend walking with you through a museum: pointing out good design and bad ideas; linking various domains (graphic design, usability, psychology) together. You learn things slowly, almost by symbiosis. Visual Explanations will be enchanting for people who have the time to read it in that way. It will be frustrating for people looking for a practical guide: This is not a textbook. The book itself is beautifully produced.
Topics covered include: clarity and purpose of information, color scheme choice, and composition of images.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A must-read for anybody with something to tell
Comment: In this book, an expert of visual explanations uses visual explanations to tell us his ideas how to use visual cues to explain concepts, quantities, timelines etc. Tufte, with his eternal self-confidence and succinct prose gives good examples and shows how a good image can be better; gives bad examples and has no hesitation to call something (even authorities' products) 'ghastly' or 'nightmare'. I think this book is a must for anybody who wants to use visual cues and examples for the ideas they want to convey. That is, everybody, in this time and age of information.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Explaining Quality Visual Information
Comment: Edward Tufte's book "Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative" is a 157 page exercise in critical thinking. The author discusses and analyzes visual information, pointing out flaws and strengths of various visual depictions. One becomes more aware of visual information and what constitutes ideal pictorial information.
"Visual Explanations" covers the topics of images and quantities, displaying evidence, pictorial instructions and disinformation, the smallest visual effective difference, repetition and change, multiples, and visual confections. Although the book has little to do with charts and graphs, reading the book makes one aware of all visual information and its ideal presentation. Anyone that works with or uses charts, illustrations, and any visual data will probably find this book useful. The book is richly illustrated with examples.
This book would be great for people that use statistics in their work or make presentations. It teaches people to be a critical thinkers concerning visual information and presentation. Even if you do not agree with Tufte, "Visual Explanations" will make you think about things you otherwise might not have.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Learn how human information capacity affects your designs
Comment: An amazing book! While I'm not sure that it's worth giving up shelf space for, it's more than worth borrowing from your local library and reading.The biggest things I pulled out of this were around information density and the capacities that humans have. This book provided me with a framework for looking at mediums of display to the user and to better understand how I can choose how much data and how to present it to best allow them to reason around it. The examples are also beautifully produced and masterfully composed. The book itself is an amazing artifact! Near the end, he talks about 'confections' and, while it was an interesting section, it was the one section of the book that it was difficult to pull out prescriptive guidance from.
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