Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition
by Steve Krug
Amazon Price: $24.00
Customer Review: Bought because it was on Joel on Software's reading list. Clear and simple, easy to understand. If picked up in a shop, I would not have bought it.

- not much content, lots of whitespace, large fonts, lots of images
- common sense (ie, most of it you probably already know)

Read a few pages, then sent it to a friend who is building her first website.

Dreamweaver CS3: The Missing Manual
by David McFarland
Amazon Price: $26.99
Customer Review: I still use this book on most working days.
It is such a great reference for dreamweaver.
One of its main features are all of the things that you don't get in the official documentations.

Really well written continueing the great tradition of the
'missing manuals'

Tony

Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML
by Eric Freeman, Elisabeth Freeman
Amazon Price: $23.99
Customer Review: This book is really nice. The way of using a lot of pictures works for me. I love reading it, and I was excited every time I enter a new chapter. Very good for beginner web developer to understand clearly about the concept of HTML & CSS.

HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Sixth Edition (Visual Quickstart Guide)
by Elizabeth Castro
Amazon Price: $20.99
Customer Review: Elizabeth Castro has written yet another good book. This book is easy to follow,clear and is printed in full colour, something you don't often come across in other books. I'd recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn the ins and outs of css and xhtml.This is a Great book.
HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Sixth Edition (Visual Quickstart Guide)

Adobe Illustrator CS3 Classroom in a Book
by Adobe Creative Team
Amazon Price: $32.99
Customer Review: Started using Illustrator about two months ago and got lost from time to time and had to spend hours trying to unravel my mistakes. This book is wonderful, it is easy to use and is a big help to the novice. I would recomend it to anyone that wants to get to know the product.
Very happy with this purchase!

Web Analytics: An Hour a Day
by Avinash Kaushik
Amazon Price: $19.79
Customer Review: My only issue is that the book doesn't address how to use google analytics more. He gives a lot of suggestions, but there isn't enough guidance in actually how to use GA to pull the data he recommends.

Head First Design Patterns (Head First)
by Elisabeth Freeman, Eric Freeman, Bert Bates, Kathy Sierra
Amazon Price: $29.67
Customer Review: At first glance this book resembles a comic book, and this may persuade you to put away the book. I recommend that you go through the first chapter and make your decision.

In reality as SW Engineers while designing a system we consider a set of requirements required to meet current deadline. We also attempt to think through several permutations and combinations of these requirements t...

Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Con...
by Tim Ash
Amazon Price: $19.79
Customer Review: Amazingly enough, virtually everything you need to know about optimizing the commercial efficiency of a website (not just a "landing page") is included, concisely, in Landing Page Optimization. In addition to the motivation for doing optimization, how to select what to optimize, and, in detail, how to measure and analyze your optimizations, Tim Ash includes helpful summaries of the psychology of ...

JavaScript: The Good Parts
by Douglas Crockford
Amazon Price: $19.79
Customer Review: For about as long as it's been about, Javascript has endured a plague of poorly written and presented books. "A Million and One Ways to Write a Rollover." Many books will treat writing a function as an advanced move. It is left as an exercise for the reader how to manage ones code when the scale surpasses the trivial.

Douglas Crockford, who works at Yahoo, is unable to leave these que...

Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 Hands-On Training
by Garrick Chow
Amazon Price: $29.99
Customer Review: The author gives you a good workout in practicing many of the common tasks that you will need in using Dreamweaver. All the exercises work just the way he describes in the book (as is not always the case). He does not thoroughly explain WHY you need to do these tasks, but he goes a long way to making the program approachable, at least. I found that I also needed more knowledge of XHTML (I used XHT...