There is no required textbook for this course (part of my philosophy of using publicly, freely available materials, and because I think we can construct at least as good materials on our own). So, while we do not have a required textbook for this course, I do recommend several books to you. Here are the primary ones.
Information Visualization: Perception for Design, 2nd ed. Colin Ware, Morgan Kaufmann, 2004, ISBN 1-55860-819-2. This is my personal favorite because pretty good coverage (at least as good as any other one), and emphasis on grounding it from the perception side (which is my bias as well).
Information Visualization: Design for Interaction, Robert Spence, 2nd Edition, Prentice-Hall. Probably next best to Ware's as general purpose textbook.
Introduction to Information Visualization, Richardo Mazza, Spring. Small inexpensive paperback that does a pretty good brief summarization.
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd ed, by Edward Tufte. All of Tufte's books are great. This is the closet in theme to our course. It is the best from an artistic, graphic design perspective.
Show Me the Numbers, Stephen Few, Analytics Press. This is my favorite book for charts, tables, graphs. He takes the many design guidelines from others, and turns it into practical advice on how to do stuff.
Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think, Card, Stuart K., Mackinlay, Jock D., and Shneiderman, Ben. Morgan Kaufmann 1999. The good news is that most of these are available on the web, so you don't need to purchase the book. While some are a bit dated, this is the best collection of foundational literature from this field.
Applied Security Visualization This is an applied book for a specific area, looks interesting as well, but I haven't read it (it's available in the library as well).
Note, many of these are available for preview on Google Books.