Mastering Digital SLR Photography

This is quite a heavy read, but David Busch has done a great job of explaining complex issues in easy to comprehend terms. In this book, he refuses to gloss over any details and consequently arms the reader with a deep understanding of photography's "first principles". One minor criticism would be that this is a very long book. That may be an inevitable consequence of covering so much ground in such detail, but at times I felt he might have shortened some of the sections without losing any of the insight. Nevertheless, this was a great introduction for me and whetted my appetite to experiment and to try to develop some photography skills. If you want a much simpler table of settings for different needs, try Scott Kelby's digital photography books. If you want a detailed understanding of the concepts behind those settings, read this.