Outdoor Photography magazine is well worth the cover price - I'd go along with the others & say play around with the camera first beore buying a book - however what you may want to consider is how you process the images afterwards - most cameras come with some software. Photoshop is the bees knees (but ludicrously expensive). I use Corel PaintShopPro and there are lots of books around on that, plus a number of sites that do tutorials on using it in particular
http://www.khiba.com/PSP/index.htm is excellent.
Cheers
Ian