If you haven’t installed the developer tools that came with your mac, you’ve probably missed out on Quartz Composer. This fantastic little program lets you build great screen savers or movies by drag & drop.
Zugakousaku has made some of the best examples.

Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects is the book that taught me After Effects a few years back.
Unlike many other books for learning software, this one is written in a simple language that makes it very easy to understand the different concepts.
I think I can guarantee that you’ll be able to do almost anything you [...]