303 tricky checkmates to help your tactical skills and to show you what a complex and fun game chess is. 303 tricky tactics is also a fantastic book for improving your tactics, you just need to work your way through all of it.
The amateurs mind by Jeremy Silman once you have a rating around 1000.
Silman's Complete Endgame Course by Jeremy Silman also when you have a rating around 1000.
"How to Beat Your Dad at Chess" -- good book that gives 50 essential mateing patterns.
Silman's Complete Endgame Course has material for any and all players at any level from absolute beginners to masters. However, for players new to the game I prefer Pandolfini's Endgame Course because it teaches a broader range of useful techniques for checkmating with the heavy pieces. Such checkmates should be mastered immediately.
Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess remains better than most for the beginning player. Stuart Margulies, who conceived the design and wrote most of it, understood well the needs of beginning players and is an authority on chess pedagogy.
Tactics books are a dime a dozen. Find one that draws its examples from real games and that doesn't overwhelm you with its complexity, and you will advance in skill by working through it. Several large format workbooks aimed at scholastic players are good for adults, too:
John A. Bain, Chess Tactics for Students
Todd Bardwick, Chess Workbook for Children
Dean Ippolito, Chess Tactics for Scholastic Players
The best general tactics book in my library is Lev Alburt, Chess Training Pocket Book. The problems vary in difficulty, but every one teaches an important lesson that will recur in practical play. The book consists of 300 critical positions. He recently brought out a second text with 300 new problems. I have not yet, but soon will add it to my library.
Beginning players should avoid study of the openings beyond basic principles like development and center control, but should learn a few moves of the Spanish and Italian openings and play them often from both sides. Later, the Queen's Gambit can be added.
thanks to those who gave their recommendations. This means a lot to me. And may I be allowed to gush Ziryab, wow that's quite a mouthful! I sure hope I find the time to read all those. I noticed though that Silman's name came up twice.
Well, recommendations are still very much welcome!
Silman's books are very good, but most are aimed at players in the C through A classes that are struggling to improve. His endgame book is aimed at all levels, and his Complete Book of Chess Strategy is more of a reference book, and not a very good one--it lacks the necessary indexes to make things easy to find, and has afew significant holes.
Reassess Your Chess and The Amateur's Mind work best together, are real labor to be beneficial, and will not help a player that cannot quickly spot most of the elementary tactics--forks, skewers, discovered attacks, X-rays, etc., and has the capacity to finish a win after winning a piece without granting compensation for it.
Well the amateur's mind is fine for players above 1000 uscf. You would of course want to go over it later on when you achieved a greater understanding of chess but it is a very powerful book. It allowed me to make the jump from 1300 to 1600uscf a few months after reading it.
In general you want to always be studying tactics, but besides that the middlegame and the endgame are where you should turn your attention to until you become a powerful player. Then when you turn your attention to the openings you will understand it better with your middle and endgame knowledge than you would otherwise.
Guess I don't have one that I can highly recommend 'cause I'm the newbie.
What would you recommend?