This may be old school - and may be biased towards nature and macro photography - but these are quite simply the best books I've read as far as the "basics" of photography: John Shaw's "The Nature Photographer's Complete Guide to Professional Field Techniques" and "Closeups in Nature". These two books excel in the description of the basics foundations of photography - metering, "zone placement", how to run tests before shooting something important, and gobs of additionals - all presented in an easy to understand, plain English way - he presents it in such a way as to make you go "Duh - of Course!". After I read his first book, my photography improved....well, what I was doing before really couldn't qualify as photography. In all seriousness, either one of these books WILL get you technically proficient enough to excel at the craft and give a good platform to begin developing your own style with the control needed to predict the outcome of your exposures. (Yes, they're that good - follow his guidelines, and out of a 36 exposure roll, you will get 36 technically correctly exposed images - (he also gives a slew of aesthetic recommendations and starting guidelines was well!) If your photography doesn't improve 100%, I'll pay for one of the books!!! (seriously!) Wolf