I'm using Interactive Data Visualization for the Web by Scott Murray

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920026938.do

You can read it for free at Oreilly's Chimera labs

http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000345

This is the gentlest introduction to d3 out there.

Run through the book and you will have a solid foundation to start playing around on your own for basic visualizations and charts.

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920026938.do

This was also posted on HN a while back:

http://code.hazzens.com/d3tut/lesson_0.html

d3 is not dependant on jquery and covers a lot of the same basic DOM manipulation. You also need to learn some super basic css to theme things.

Check out Scott Murray's D3 Tutorials

http://alignedleft.com/tutorials/d3/

Also in book: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920026938.do

FYI, every day at O'Reilly is 50 percent off ebooks. If you're a logged in member, one of the perpetual in house ads will be for a code for "Buy 1 ebook, get 1 free"

Also FYI, the most recent purchase I made was a book that made HN's front page last week: interactive Data Vizualization for the Web. And I highly recommend it

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920026938.do

Scott Murray has published some great tutorials on D3.js (http://alignedleft.com/tutorials/d3/), and has an O'Reilly book on "Interactive Data Visualization for the Web" that's about it as well: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920026938.do