Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists

I would highly recommend learning R (http://www.r-project.org/). It is very easy to directly query databases and R has many visualisation packages, including the awesome ggplot2 (http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/) based on the grammar of graphics. I'm writing an R graphs cookbook and my startup's visualisation product is also built on R (see profile and feel free to email me if you need any help). Also, look at Ben Fry's Processing books (http://benfry.com/). Here's an introductory tutorial - http://blog.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/your-random-numbers-getti... (http://blog.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/your-random-numbers-getting-started-with-processing-and-data-visualization)). If you're familiar with Python, check out Matplotlib (https://www.packtpub.com/matplotlib-python-development/book).