one of the things that gets me is that there are usually several ways to achieve the same result in photoshop. the learning curve is steep. I know that i do many thing inefficiently and others much better. personally i am not much of a book learner as i prefer to do things. adobe has a series of online video tutorials which i find help a lot. admitedly they will be for the newest versions of photoshop, but often times it is the understanding that is important, as with things like layer masks etc where the key concepts haven't changed at all. other tools such as the healing brush and history brush won't even be there on the older versions. that said i use CS3 as work buys the latest version for me, but i would be happy with version 5 most of the time.