Hollywood 101: The Film Industry by Frederick Levy
Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee
The IFILM Digital Video Filmmaker's Handbook by Maxie D. Collier
ON FILM EDITING ? Edward Dmytryk
The Independent Film Producer's Survival Guide: A Business and Legal Sourcebook by Gunnar Erickson, Mark Halloran and Harris Tulchin

=============================================
The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress.
Joseph Joubert, essayist (1754-1824)

There's also quite a few recommended books on this site:

http://www.filmmaking.net/bookstore/category.asp?id=1

--
Benjamin Craig
Editor-in-Chief, filmmaking.net

Haven't been to this forum in a long while. I know this is two months too late, but just in case someone is still watching, here's my own two cents.

For aspiring filmmakers who are extremely young, impatient and with short attention span, the best filmmaking books are usually the simple and short ones, as incomplete as they may be. So:

Filmmaking For Dummies (by Bryan Michael Stoller), or
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Independent Filmmaking (by Josef Steiff), or
if the reader is really, really quickly bored by books, probably the shortest book out there that covers filmmaking from writing to postproduction:
Moviemaking Course: Principles, Practice, and Techniques: The Ultimate Guide for the Aspiring Filmmaker ( by Chris Patmore) -- only about 140 pages, all of them heavily illustrated. It takes less than two hours to finish it!

There is also abundance of filmmaking information online, which requires some creative googling, but it is there.

There are a lot of good books and manuals available on making movies, but it really depends on what you want to do. Do you want to learn how to make big productions or are you making smaller indie films? How much time do you want to spend on learning how to make a movie?

One of the books I liked a lot was Video Shooter by Barry Braverman. The book covers a lot of information, but it is written in small easy to digest chunks. It is more of a manual kind of book. You don't have to read it all to get it, but you can flick through it and pick out the things you like or want to know.

Reading reviews online of books isn't always a good option, because books and manuals really are a personal thing. Some people like meatier stuff other people like short and sweet guidelines. Have you tried going to your local book store to browse through their film making section? That might be your best best bet to find something YOU like.

Hope this helps

I also found The Producer's Insider Guide to Selling Films series by Amemimo Publishing to be an essential reference when it comes to selling your films to distributors.

recently read and truly enjoyed "The Writer's Journey" (great for understanding story structure... you can use this book more as a bible if you're ever stuck in a dull act) and "Director's Tell the Story" by Bethany Rooney and Mary Belli. So awesome to hear 2 successful women break down what its really like to work on production.