It might not the best for beginners but I recommend “The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web”. It shows you how some of the earlier design on the Zen Garden page were made and includes many basic design principles.
I like books… but I LOVE video tutorials… http://Lynda.com
I tenth Ian’s Book.
You may want to reconsider the doctype, you may not, but other than that it is incredible.
A website: www.htmldog.com may be of use.
I think you can get by using web resources and there are plenty out there… save yourself a few pennies
Ian’s book is the way to go.
The web is great and you can find fixes to your problems, but to be honest, there’s something about having a nice paper based resource to hand.
Good luck
Thanks for all the replies. Looks like I have a lot more reading to do.
Thanks again for all your help
chevywes
Hi chevywes, if you are new to design in both web & print i’d reccommend buying a graphic design book. Learning a few basic graphic design principles to start with can help you save time in the future.
Good luck with it.
I’d recommend this one, and not just because it’s a SitePoint book:
The Principles of Beautiful Web Design. Excellent.
Definitely Ian Lloyds book. I wrote a review of it sometime ago which you can read here: http://rabbitsfeat.wordpress.com/2008/07/09/learning-html-and-css/
I’ve also learn’t a lot from the tutorial videos from http://www.lynda.com
Good luck!
I’d say skip the book reading and go straight to laying out test templates with Dreamweaver. If my mother can learn how to create tables and place items on the page, so can you! Purchase Dreamweaver and get a starter book if you must using Dreamweaver.
GOOD LUCK!
If my mother can learn how to create tables and place items on the page, so can you!
You shouldn’t be using tables for laying out web pages anymore! That’s where a book like Ian Lloyds will help you and make sure you start by doing things the right way.
Correct. But for a beginner they need to learn the basics as with e-mail marketing you have to use tables as the industry for marketing through e-mails and online becomes more and more popular. If you can’t market your website through e-mail your website is useless regardless of how you design it haha I prefer layers, but lets not confuse the beginners requests here
this is a good list of sources thanks for taking the time guys
Why spend over $400 to learn how to use a program that doesn’t even produce semantic code when you can learn how to do something for free, or for no more than $25-50?
One vote for Ian’s book. I can’t say enough good things about it.
I went from knowing absolutely zero about anything web (sad for an IT professional of 7 years at the time) to building a website in 2 to 3 months.
Its also a pretty fun read for a tech book.
I second that.
Personally I learnt web design right here in the SitePoint forums. I have never even seen a web design book, let alone read one before. Although I have downloaded a few PDF’s of them and flicked through. But none of them seemed to have anything I couldn’t learn from the forums anyway, and Google is able to teach me the rest
follow video tutorials in the web
I would! Its the book which I learn’t with, and then simply javascript (which i am yet to complete, having owned it for a year) and Build your own database driven website using php and mysql also slipped onto mmy shelf.
What a shame! 
I third it