Well, I still have a soft spot for the architectural pictures of Julius Shulman's book "Architecture and photography" (Taschen)
Ansel Adam's trilogy (the camera, the negative, the print) is pretty interesting, though highly technical and really not recommended for beginners.
I also like Edward Weston (Taschen) and Color Photography (Assoulines).
Oh yeah, there's also What did you shoot this weekend? by a small little known group of photographers. From memory it can be found on Blurb.