You might want to check out some blogs, as well. Wordpress blogs (except for customizations) depend on CSS. If you can think of your page in terms of blocks, that will help.
Sitepoint has a couple of good books, "Build Your Own Web Site The Right Way Using HTML & CSS" and "HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS, 2nd Edition". I believe the first book is more for beginners of HTML.
The <DIV> element tends to be used the most to control where the different blocks are placed.