The first two references below are suitable for readers with a general interest; beyond that the texts are much more technical.

Recommended Reading:

• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Edward R. Tufte, 1983, ISBN 0-96-139210-X
  • Indispensable for anybody who has to prepare graphical material for presentation. Chapter 2 is also recommended for its value in exposing a number of gimmicks used by the unethical to distort graphical data.
• How To Lie With Statistics, Darrell Huff, 1954, ISBN 0-393-09426-X
  • How to recognize nonsense in various forms, all of which you are likely to encounter daily. How to avoid becoming a statistical liar.
• Exploratory Data Analysis, John W. Tukey, 1977, ISBN 0-201-07616-0
  • The classic text in the field.
• Statistics for Experimenters, Box, Hunter, & Hunter, ISBN 0-471-09315-7
  • Useful for design and analysis of statistical presentations
• Modern Applied Statistics with S-PLUS, Venables & Ripley, ISBN 0-387-98214-0 (2nd Ed.), 0-387-98825-4 (3rd Ed.)
  • Specific to a widely-used software package for data analysis.
• Dynamic Graphics for Statistics, Cleveland & McGill, Eds., ISBN 0-534-09144-X
  • Now primarily of historical interest; a snapshot of the state-of-the-art in the mid-'80s

Web Resources:

• "Insightful" (formerly MathSoft) (commercial S-PLUS software for data analysis)
• Statlib (collection of software and resources for statistical data analysis)
• Vista: The Visual Statistics System (free and open software for statistical data analysis)