New Perspectives on JavaScript (by Patrick Carey and Frank Canovatchel) is the textbook for the class I'm taking from Saint Paul College as I work toward a

The great thing about this book is that instead of telling you here's how to do this, and here's how to do that, before giving any real-world explanation of how these techniques should be employed, each tutorial of this book—it is broken down into ten—provides a real-world problem that needs to be solved, then slowly introduces the techniques that will come in handy for solving them.

The part I find most interesting about how they wrote this book (so far, as of part way through Tutorial 4) is that they have chosen these real-world problems without getting ahead of themselves, a phrase which here means "when they presented the Public Library staff directory problem in Tutorial 1, they didn't need looping or conditional operators to complete theproblem, techniques that were not the focus of that tutorial."

Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML (by Elisabeth Freeman and Eric Freeman) is a great book for learning HTML, XHTML, and CSS.

The head first books also take something of a real-world approach to solving problems (though with a bit more about the techniques up front than the JavaScript book above.

One of the very best things about the Head First books is the way that they are written: with the intent of teaching you the information that you are going to need the most, in a way that—it is hoped—will enable you to remember that information when you do need it most.

Head Rush Ajax (by Brett McLaughlin) is yet another fine book in the Head First tradition.

It is obvious (after reading the introduction to any Head First book) that these folks have done their research on learning techniques, and know how to make the topics most memorable.