These may help beginner:

Principles Of Beautiful Web Design
Adobe Photoshop CS3 Classroom in a Book
XHTML And CSS : A Web Standards Approach   <- this one is awesome
The CSS Anthology : 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks
WordPress Theme Design (here is the newer version)

Http://www.cssmastery.com/ and Don't Make me Think by Steve Krug.

For web design (the emphasis here being on "design") then look no further than Sitepoint's excellent The Principles of Beautiful Web Design. For coding I think I used O'Reilly's Definitive Guide but you can learn most coding online (W3Schools is one of the best resources in my opinion).

@Dontbm, I think saying you don't need to know PHP for that reason is kind of ignorant. You don't necessarily need to become an expert on the subject but having a basic grasp of what it is that you're working with is very important when it comes down to basic customization and troubleshooting.

I think PHP is probably the last thing you want to learn about, it's a low level programming language which means that you do a lot of manual work. These days 95% of websites use a prepackaged content management system, probably built on PHP so you don't need to know PHP yourself, you just use function calls a la Wordpress.

A good place to start is CSS Mastery which is the best value for buck when it comes to standard based webdesign books. Andy Clarke is a total douchebag and an asshole, but that's the way he's positioned himself to go against "the man" so whatever, but his book Transcending CSS is a good primer on the visual side of things.

Hope this helps.

O'Reilly PHP Cookbook-This is from cookbook series of
O'reilly. Most of the books in cookbook series follow simple learn by
doing approach. So i guess this is applicable to this book as well.

Absolute passion.

I like any of the missing manual books, they helped me a lot when I was first getting into this. I have the CSS and Javascript one. Great stuff