On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee is a tremendous book, it goes into the science, lore and history of pretty much anything within Western cookery. It works well as a reference to use for understanding the concepts behind how things are done but does not really have any specific recipes.
The Joy of Cooking and How to Cook Everything are both good general cookbooks, with a good selection of recipes, again within the Western, or more specifically, American, cooking styles. The Silver Spoon is a very similar book but from Italy that has been recently translated into English.
I have not had a chance to get my eyes on it yet, but I suspect that Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s The River Cottage Cookbook would be an excellent book due to the amount I have learned about the basic techniques of meat cookery from his The River Cottage Meat Book.
As for websites, thePauperedChef.com is a good source, it is a blog, and so the information is not clearly layed out, but they tend to do a great job of giving both motivation and the information needed to try a lot of different things.
Also a word of warning on cooking classes, a lot of them tend to be very minimal on skill and technique education and will primarily just send you home with a handful of fancy recipes. Some of them can be worthwhile, so just make sure they are focused on primary skills and techniques and less on recipes.
My primary suggestion would be picking basic dishes that are dependent on a specific technique and try them over and over. Roast chicken is an excellent one to go with, it is hard to make something inedible, and if done regularly will give you a lot of practice with roasting, carving, and if you save the carcasses, stock making.