First off, I just love the Rick Steves books. He cuts through a lot of the filler material you find in the brick-like guides, and focuses on enough material for a couple of weeks in whatever country he's covering. On the flip side, if you're a backpacker and staying for a month, these books will give a nice overview - they'll still be the best to figure out where you want to go in the first place - but you're going to want a Lonely Planet guide or something to fill out your stay. Note that most of the Rick Steves books get updated every year, and I've gone through and found the latest versions.

I should also say, if Rick Steves sounds vaguely familiar but you can't quite place him, you've probably seen his TV show Rick Steves Travels in Europe. I enjoy his books more than his TV show, but the TV show is great when you see how beautiful some area is that you might not have considered visiting otherwise. You can find these on your local PBS station or Click Here to see the "best of". I've noticed that Amazon seems to have trouble keeping it in stock, but from there it's easy to get to the individual countries if you're interesting in something specific.

First off, if you've never traveled without a tour group, you'll want to pick up Europe Through the Back Door for general techniques. It also covers some of the more popular cities in Europe but that's really not what it's for.

And if you're at all interested in art, Mona Winks is a very cool guide through to find the good stuff among the filler in various museums. As amazing as some of the big European national museums are, they can be very uneven with excellent rooms followed by rooms full of junk.

Then if you're going to focus on one or two countries, get the country guides. I pretty much have all of these even though I haven't been to all the countries yet simply because I find it really useful to figure out which countries I want to visit in which order. Again, these keep getting updated and expanded every year. Even if you have an old one, you'll want to stay current. It's crazy to spend thousands of dollars on a trip and not spend a few bucks on a current guidebook.

Click on the book to go to its page on Amazon.com

You can just use the city guides if you're on more of a whirlwind tour or are doing something like flying to a big city because it's cheaper but then going to another country from there. A good example would be flying into London, spending a couple of days, and then flying to Ireland. We did that, using British Midlands for the short hop, and it worked really well.

Rick Steves also has nice phrase books. They have enough phrases to be useful without a lot of filler. These are especially useful with a little study before you start talking. Most things you do, like reserve a room, more or less follow a script so you pretty much just need a couple of phrases, like "I would like a room for two people, non smoking for tonight". They'll say "we're full" or ask for your name, which means you're in. No problem.

If you're serious about eating, you'll need a Marling Menu Master. It's a little book that pretty much just has food words. It also has a practice menu so you can get the hang of how menus are organized in different countries (this is a bigger issue than you might think!). It's small enough that you can carry it around all the time and actually use it at a table without looking like a total idiot.

I'll be covering books for the US soon, so stay tuned!