A good photography book for beginners - and general advice

Hello, fellows,

I'm back here for the feedback of the books you've suggested me.
I've picked up two of them:
- Digital photography 1, 2, 3 by Scott Kelby
- Understanding exposure by Bryan Peterson.

Kelby's has some nice tips, certainly, but it has some negative points.
First, his sense of humor, well, if I wanted a book of jokes, I'd had gone to another section on the bookshop. He tries to do at least one joke in every page, some are nice, but it's boring and tiresome to have it throughout the three volumes! By the way, why 3 volumes? He certainly could have made it shorter - 2 volumes. There are too much empty spaces in some pages, and the end of books are filled with advertisement.
He also repeats something thousandfold - for instance, that you need a tripod. As I said, I learned somethings reading it, but it doesn't make me buying anything else from Kelby.

As for Peterson's Understanding exposure - his writing style is much better. He explains things in a clear way, the photographs examples comes with handful subtitles. Doubtless, after reading it one needs a lot of practise to really achieve that high command of exposure, but many things are going to be much clear.

Thank you all for the suggestion. When I read other books of photography, either suggest here or not, I'm going to do new reviews.

Photography for Dummies and that entire series of books just seems like a cruel title.