Just like the other Visual Quickstart Guides, this book goes over the basics for Photoshop CS3, and teaches you how to use Photoshop and give you a basic understanding on how Photoshop works as well.  Very easy to understand as they give these mini tutorials in each section that they cover, such as filters, brushes, layers, layer effects and gradients to name a few.  This is a good book to learn the beginnings on how to  use  Photoshop, but once you understand the basic concepts from  this book you will be able to move on to other books that go into more detail in the sections that this book covers.  It also includes a companion website as well to download the images that this book uses as well.