I have been creating websites on my own for a while now and I am sick to death of getting one looking perfect in FF only to open it in IE and have it look horrible or vise versa. I then spend hours upon hours reading online articles and hacking away at my CSS to get it to render properly on both. Because of this I would like to find a book that focuses on good web design structure and cross-browser friendlyness. I have read many tricks to get things to appear properly in both but I am not looking for a cheat sheet of hacks and fixes, I want to design my code and sites based on proper standards that are also supported by the most popular browsers out there.
This should be an easy one, but I'm also looking for a good JavaScript book. I'm a complete JavaScript beginner but I know several other languages so I don't want to read 5 chapters on how scripting works or what an object is. Something that starts off with the basics and moves quickly into advanced real-life application would be great.
If anyone has any suggestions (preferably from Authors who frequent JavaRanch) please let me know and thanks!!