For (a) I would recommend Mark Boulton's book, Designing for the Web, which is available free online:

http://designingfortheweb.co.uk/book/index.php

It has really competent sections dedicated to aesthetics: typography, color, and layout. That he made it free is unbelievable. It's a resource I always recommend to the developers I work with (I'm a designer) who want to understand more about design.

Here are some other related websites that might interest you:

http://www.moreofit.com/similar-to/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdesigni...

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However, keep in mind that while the designs presented in many of these resources may look outdated, the principles behind them are solid.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.

(a) is quite the tough one. Large part of the problem is taste. You need it, as does the author of any guidelines, and you and the author need to be in sync.

Worth looking into are grid layouts, and CSS frameworks that making working with grids easier. I'm a fan of 960gs, but there are a few good ones.

http://www.thegridsystem.org/

http://delicious.com/jamesbritt/Grid

I suggest you read the non-designers design book. A lot of it is pure math - colors, alignment, contrast, repetition, and proximity. Even if you won't learn how to design you will learn to tell good design from bad, and what makes it so.

Stay away from Kindle version though - in a twist of irony the book's layout has been severely corrupted, serving more as an anti-example to its own content.

great list, thanks

I wrote a blog post the went very briefly about design tips for programmers

http://arandomurl.com/2010/07/07/design-tips-for-programmers...

there is also a few linked resources from there, the video and the book at the end are really good.

Ha, yes I liked it. In fact your actually part of the list above under:

I have found some good online articles http://delicious.com/csmeder/ux

Added yours to this list (with some voting) in case anyone is interested:

http://buyersvote.com/categories/the-best-books-to-learn-gra...

Excellent! What a helpful list. This is one of my major stumbling blocks as a programmer trying to build usable apps.