I read a lot of books pertaining to programming and web technology.  Unfortunately keeping up with the tech world is a never ending battle, but it is a necessary evil.  One of my down falls has always been web design, I can usually code a back-end just great, but coming up with a nice UI will give me the equivalent of writers block in a hurry.  One of the big issues I found was I simply didn’t have the tools to turn a design I came up with into a clean, usable UI for my sites.  I did your typical noob html layout for a long time, nested HTML tables with lots of spacer gifs.  There had to be a better way.  Enter CSS, cascading style sheets. 

I picked up a book called Bullet Proof Webdesign by Dan Cederholm (0321509021).  All in all this is a really great book for someone that has done little to no CSS, but is pretty familiar with HTML concepts.  After reading this book a chapter a night I was able to do just about whatever I needed to with CSS.  The whole book is based around the “old” way of doing things (like I mentioned above) and the correct way.  I highly recommend this book!