It's been a while since posting something useful, but I thought I'd recommend a site that provides both visual and written explanation for CSS layout basics. 

What I enjoyed most about discovering Matthew James Taylor's site was that he shares his two passions, art and web design, in easy-to-understand and relevant terms. The site is a nice "go to" resource for new designers or developers searching for more than just plain-text or academic explanations.  For example, Matthew has a number of popular CSS layouts very well documented with visual guides that are sometimes missing from the vast majority of tutorial sites.

Each layout example can be further explored and studied just by reviewing the source code of its url. I like using Google Chrome's "Inspect Element" (right click, choose "Inspect Element"), or Firebug (choose "HTML") to study each tag or class and to give myself a better understanding of the underlying principals.  However, the descriptive explanations of the how's and why's are an added benefit.

The Matthew James Taylor site also contains articles and insights into topics such as SEO, link sourcing, tabs and menus, and even an article on Dreamweaver's CSS rendering bug. And for a bit of lite inspiration, I especially appreciate his artwork gallery that's sure to be a hit with you Illustrator gurus. 

I'm hoping this site proves useful to someone.  It's difficult to know exactly what benefits the entire group versus smaller constituencies, so let me know if anyone found Matthew's site worthy of this notable mention.