Real World Illustrator by Mordy Golding

[JMGNole]

Great book.  I learned more in the time I spent going through this book than I'd learned using Illustrator for several years.  So many smart, and smarter ways to do things that how I was going about it. 

If you need to learn Illustrator, this is the way to go.  The Appearances palette alone changed the way I do everything.

[RobertPlantFan]

I missed this post before, but I give Real World Illustrator a thumbs up as well. Mordy has a blog where he writes about the subject as well.

There are "Real World" series books (written by other authors) for most of the Adobe and other mainstream applications. All of them get right down to the brass tacks for using the apps in a production environment.