Hi Ryan, like Todd, I am guessing that you are more beginner than intermediate.
Before you fork out for books, there are a lot of resources on the web that provide introductions to good database design. In my not-so-extensive experience teaching databases (ms-access), I found that the relational concept was the most difficult for a lot of students to grasp. Those that did, went on to create databases that were useful and extensible, and not just uber-spreadsheets.
My recommendation is that you start with this. Learn the relational model, data normalization, denormalizing for performance etc. Until you have understood this, don't even bother looking at data models, or trying to learn SQL..... they won't make sense, and you will probably just end up creating elaborate spreadsheets.
Here are some introductions to database design. Most of them are one of two pages long. The last two are ms-access centered but are really good at introducing databse design and modelling. Hope this helps
