[dca]

> Edward Tufte's book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is a monumental book.

Agreed, its absolutely excellent. Thanks to Y Combinator for listing it in the book list.

> Additionally, if I were you, I'd stay way from statistical approaches to displaying information...

Not agreed. In my opinion you might have missed what I felt was a main point of that book: Always learn the appropriate statistics required to understand the data, choose a correct visualization method to communicate those statistics effectively, and once you've understood it fully, confirmed the results, and removed all the cruft, then publish it.

[alilja]

What I meant was to shy away from approaches that are PURELY based on statistics if you have no background in it, because it can get overwhelming quickly.

Of course, if it's worth it to invest the time required to have a fundamental understanding of statistics, by all means do so -- but if this is a one-time or a short-term project, I'm not sure the time commitment is worth it.

[lukev]

Hm... In my experience, that's the best part of projects, is being able to learn something new while doing them.