Chess Book Recommendations

I'm looking for some recommndations for the beginnings of a chess library.

I'm pretty much a beginner (albeit an enthusiastic one).I'm still getting the hang of visualizing positions based on pure notation, so pictures are a good thing ;)

Would appreciate any recommendations and a quick note as to why you recommend them.Books geared toward beginner-intermediate level would perhaps be of most use.

1.Chirnov's Logical Chess Move by Move-Always highly recommended to beginners.

2.Understanding Chess Endgames.-Covers 100 basic endgames one must know and lays the foundation for further endgame study

3.Improving Chess Thinker-You test yourself on certain positions then compare your protocols with various students of Dan Heisman (ranging from under 1000 through over 2000).  Gives recommendations to reach the next level.

4.Anything that teaches opening principles (as opposed to theory) like get out the minors, castle, connect the rooks, etc.

5.A tactic website for warm up drills.  Heisman recommends 15 minutes of it. 

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm currently trying to do at least 50 tactics a day on chess.com.I was struggling in the 800 range,but now I'm finally to 1100. I know that's still very low, but just about 2 months ago I never knew any of the tactics existed.

Chernov's book has been recommended to me before, so I will definitely look at picking it up.

Anyone else?

I prefer chesstempo.com's tactics training over chess.com. A gold membership is much less than chess.com diamond, and you can select specific tactical themes. Chess.com's gives you many themes, which is a good "final exam" but not as good for learning.

My favorite book right now is The Process of Decision Making In Chess. It gives you a structured thinking process you can use to plugin other chess knowledge you learn.

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There are lots of good "starting out" chess books, and everyone has his favorite. I think people tend to recommend books that they've read and made a connection with. The ones that I connected with are:

1) The Complete Idiot's Guide to Chess, by Patrick Wolff - A good introductory single-volume book.

2) Back to Basics: Tactics, by Dan Heisman - This book doesn't have a huge number of tactics, but the tactics tend to be real-life examples that aren't overweighted with artificial queen sacs. Probably what I liked most about the book was the inclusion of discussions of counting tactics (not mentioned by many other tactics books) and "the seeds of tactical destruction". Get the second printing/edition so you don't have to deal with an errata list.

(BTW, you can also find discussions of counting tactics and the seeds of tactical destruction in Heisman's free Novice Nook articles on his web site.)

3) Guide to Good Chess, by Cecil J. S. Purdy - This is a "good news/bad news" situation. The good news is that the content of Purdy's GTGC is great for a beginner. It has advice on general principles for the three phases of the game: opening, middlegame, and endgame. However, there is almost no information on tactics, so Heisman's previously mentioned tactics book is a good companion to this one.

The bad news is that this book by Purdy is out of print and can be hard to find at a reasonable price. There are many editions available on the used book market. The earlier editions are cheap, but they're in descriptive notation and don't have the most up-to-date content. I think the last two editions are in algebraic notation, and they command a price premium.

Now, the good news to the bad news is that the content of the Guide to Good Chess can also be found in a current in-print book titled The Chess Gospel According to John. It's actually the contents of GTGC plus three articles from The Search for Chess Perfection, also by Purdy.

However, I have very mixed feelings about The Chess Gospel According to John. While it does allow you to get new copies of the content in GTGC, the editor has removed the index and the recap list of tips from the end of the book (I'm guessing to keep the page count below a certain limit?) All of the original information is still there, but without an index, it's difficult to look up topics. Also, the recap list of tips was convenient, and I wish the editor had left it in the book.