Teaching basic GIS and ArcGIS skills through real-world, professional scenarios, Discovering GIS and ArcGIS takes a task-oriented approach to solving structured problems found in careers today such as calculating the shortest route to a specific location or determining the minimum height required for an observation platform in a building design.
This is a great book. It's detailed and even in my third full semester of GIS I was learning new things about ArcGIS functionality I was practiced at using. I had an issue accessing the data at first (despite what the book said about free access to the data via a website), but after a lot of time McMillan gave me access to the data and I couldn't be happier. It really is a great book to learn both basic and advanced GIS methods.