First of all, you have to check out the last chess engine I wrote. I like it. Here is a converter from Yahoo's format to PGN and an EDN to PGN converter (EDN stands for English Descriptive Notation, a system that isn't much in use anymore).
PGN (Portable Game Notation) is the standard notation for recording and exchanging chess games. I use eboard under Linux to view games. Windows users: I hear WinBoard is not bad. Once you have a PGN viewer, check out my collection of games.
Imran Hendley is an awesome chess player. Here are the books he recommended to me and the comments he made at the time:
- Winning Chess Tactics — “You can get a discount by buying this with ‘Winning Chess Strategies’, which is a really terrible book.”
- Test Your Chess: Piece Power — “This book really helped me when I was twelve.”
- How to Reassess Your Chess — “I've never read this book, but I hear it's very helpful for people that have the kind of problems you seem to have.”
- Mark Lowery has a huge chess site.
- Chess eBook has a bunch of games and a few other things.
What Imran said about this page: “Excellent page. 10/10. In fact, 11/10.”