For a pragmatic overview the "Non Designer's Design Book" and "Bootstrapping Design" are great for developers. These cover the basics of layout, color, typogra

For a pragmatic overview the "Non Designer's Design Book" and "Bootstrapping Design" are great for developers. These cover the basics of layout, color, typography, contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity, and more. Since you're interested in CSS, I assume this is geared towards the web. I'd recommend "Designing for the Web" by Mark Boulton which dives specifically into web design. The above books gave a bird's eye view without implementation. I'd recommend reading "CSS Mastery" to learn how to actually implement a layout. If you decide to use CSS frameworks, usually the documentation is enough when you have a basic grasp of CSS. Most Photoshop books I've found cover using it for editing photos, not for graphic design. You can read these and learn a lot from them still. "Photoshop Missing Manual" covers almost everything about Photoshop, but it's a long read. I'm a huge fan of Steve Caplin's books "How to Cheat in Photoshop", "Art and Design in Photoshop", and "100% Photoshop". Graphic editors are still used for patterns, but I'm noticing a trend towards using CSS more for buttons/shadows/gradients now.