My friend Tim Sheiner, writing for the Salesforce UX blog:
demand is high for designers who can create experiences that display data in useful and interesting ways. In my personal experience this became much, much easier to do once I’d learned to speak the crisp, precise and slightly odd language used by technical people for talking about data.
What follows is a phenomenal post that clearly explains much of what you need to know to understand and speak competently about data. A must-read for anybody involved in designing for digital information environments.