I found the SitePoint book "The Principles of Beautiful Web Design" (http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Beautiful-Web-Design/dp/097...) to be very informative as well. It's a great introduction to a lot of different aspects of design that programmers generally don't think about when trying to mimic more professionally-designed sites. I read it two years ago, and it was a bit easier to digest at the time because most of the designs presented still felt current.

However, keep in mind that while the designs presented in many of these resources may look outdated, the principles behind them are solid. Tastes and trends may change, but running through a few Photoshop tutorials will get you up to speed on the execution of the latest styles. More importantly though, design basics such as readability, whitespace, proximity, alignment, proportion, color, texture, etc are timeless. If you can distill those important aspects from the materials you're reading, you'll be much better off in the long run than if you just try to copy techniques from whatever the most modern resource currently is.

These are really good points. If you want to go beyond this, I'd suggest looking at <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Beautiful-Web-Design/dp/097...">The Principles of Beautiful Web Design</a>, which is a good primer for web design principles. It's one of the few web design books aimed at people who find coding easy but design a mystery.