I have always been a fan of Herbert Schildt's "Complete Reference" series (Osborne / McGraw Hill). I have his C++ and C# 2.0 books. I think "Complete Reference" is a good name for them. Chapters 1 & 2 start as basic as what is an IDE and what is a code "comment". He explains OOP without assuming any prior knowledge. By the end of the book he's gets into things like multithreading. Plenty of code examples throughout.