Q&A: Which Tufte book to start with?

This question came in via email, regarding my Tufte seminar review post:

Thanks so much for your review of the Tufte seminar. I was about ready to plunk down the money but first did a search. I don't currently have any of his books, but I'd rather learn through the books if the seminars are not earth-shattering. Do you have a recommendation for the best one to start?

Edward Tufte's books tend to assume that you are already familiar with what he has already written, so I thus recommend that you read them in order of publication: Visual Display, Envisioning Information, Visual Explanations, and Beautiful Evidence. The order of publication is also, in my opinion, the order of the importance of their work: Visual Display and Envisioning Information are seminal works, but the latter two aren't quite as strong. I suppose that I should re-read them and post reviews sometime.

I'm not sure that I would say that Tufte has a methodology so much as a strongly worded (and sometimes self-contradictory) opinion. For all the issues that I have with implementing his opinions, I think that his opinions are ones that should be carefully considered even if they ultimately rejected for a particular design. If you find yourself disliking Tufte's approach, you might instead try Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things for a less dogmatic approach to design in general (although obviously not to interaction design in particular). Next up in my to-read queue is a book that was highly recommended by a co-worker: Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton (I'll offer the disclaimer that Buxton is a fellow Microsoft employee) which she said was an excellent book about design.