Inspired by Rob Friesel's AngularJS annotated bibliography, I am collecting articles, books, etc. on D3 here, along with my commentary and summaries. I am finding D3 to have a steep learning curve, but that no other data graphics library for the web compares.
Leland Wilkinson, The Grammar of Graphics:
There is also a practical reason for shunning chart typology. If we endeavor to develop a charting instead of a graphing program, we will accomplish two things. First, we inevitably will offer fewer charts than people want. Second, our package will have no deep structure. Our computer program will be unnecessarily copmlex, because we will fail to reuse objects or routines that function similary in different charts. And we will have no way to add new charts to our system without generating complex new code. Elegant design requires us to think about a theory of graphics, not charts.
Although D3 is a bit lower-level than what Wilkinson is describing, I think this quote still illustrates the spirit of D3.
D3: An Annotated Bibliography by David Howell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at https://github.com/dehowell/d3-annotated-bibliography.