Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML

With lots of exercises, Q&A, crosswords, and even a five-minute mystery, this book makes learning fun. Beside characters with thought bubbles, it is filled with lots of explanatory side notes with arrows pointing to screen shots, diagram, and code syntax.

It makes great use of visuals to convey concepts. For example, photo of nested dolls to convey nested elements and scales to convey font-weight. Section titles such as "HTML Archeology", "Markup Magnet", "Element Soup", and "The Case of Relatives and Absolutes" will not get you bored.

It covers HTML from the ground up going over tables, forms, XHTML, CSS, Box Model, and all the basics including web hosting and FTP.

Over 100 customers gave this book a 5-star rating on amazon.

The Principles of Beautiful Web Design

Using a real-life design example, the author starts with a discussion of layout and color theory. You see his thought process on picking out six colors for his color scheme.

If you are a programmer who have not had the formal training in art and design, this books is a great crash course. It covers all the basic principles including the user of images, typography, texture, and Web 2.0 style.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Classroom in a Book

By the Adobe Creative Team, this book covers the new features of CS3 that some older books may not cover. This includes the new smart filters, zoomify, quick selection, align content, clone source and more.

There are 14 lessons with step-by-step tutorials and review questions and 16 video tutorials.

This is a good general book that covers the basics and fundamentals of Photoshop. Perfect if you are a beginner to Photoshop. As you progress futher or have specialized use of Photoshop, see more books in the Photoshop section.