Straight to the Source

It will also lead you to a number of other blogs, such as WallStrip.com, which has hysterical daily videos, and SigmaOptions.blogspot among others.

As for books, you can't have a reading list without putting Sheldon Natenberg's Option Volatility and Pricing: Advanced Trading Strategies and Techniques at the top. This is a classic, and it covers all the concepts and strategies without agendas or false promises.

One of my personal favorites is The Option Traders Handbook, by Jabbour and Budwick. It's written by two active and practicing option traders who came from other professions, namely law and law, and they combine a disciplined learning process with great analogies and real-life examples.

One of the best books, though a bit more advanced, is Options: the Hidden Reality, by Charles Cottle. It can be found on his Web site, RiskDoctor.com, which also offers mentoring services, chat rooms and Web seminars. Cottle gets into dynamic hedging, position dissection, understanding the things that motivate market makers and defining the trading landscape. That is, he tries to point out all the pitfalls rather than emphasize the upside.

On that note, remember it's better to be looking down into a hole than the other way around.