I own all of his books and have read through them several times. I see them as filling a role somewhere between a guide and a listing taken together. It's easy enough to get 95% of the practical value by just reading one of them, but the remaining 3 provide a number of examples which can help to provide a broad perspective on Tufte's ideas while inspiring your own interpretation of them.
If you just want to make better charts, buy, a from memory guess, Envisioning Information. It provides most of the basics of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information but develops the ideas a little further and provides better, more modern examples. If you think it's a cool topic then buy them all because they're all pretty nice books.