Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice

This is a gorgeous book. Beautiful cover, beautiful typesetting, good binding, wonderful content. Though I didn't get what I was expecting (something more along the lines of Scott McCloud's books) the book was really interesting and, well... short. I would have loved to keep on reading. Thankfully, the book references an abundance of works for further study.
Last but not least, Ivan Brunetti comes across as the nicest person ever.

I'm sure this would be very useful for someone who is looking to create comics. There is a lot of insight, and some fairly practical steps to becoming better at cartooning.

But it's definitely focused on a classroom environment. He often recommends using a photocopier as one of your tools to shrink or enlarge images, for example.