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You Love Is Kinky by Dossie Easton and Catherine W. Liszt. I've also heard good things about the "Parents of Alternative Sexuality" pamphlet by Dr. Amy Marsh.

If you, like me, are particularly attracted to the idea of needle piercing, there's a great book called Play Piercing by Deborah Addington.

If you're more interested in getting a feel for common BDSM philosophies and what the BDSM community is like -- an anthropological perspective, one might say -- then there's a book by Mark Thompson called Leatherfolk, and a newer one by Staci Newmahr called Playing at the Edge.

Well-known feminist BDSM theory authors from the generation ahead of me include Pat Califia and Gayle Rubin, who are both brilliant.

Online

I usually direct total newbies to this BDSM 101 page by Franklin Veaux:
http://www.xeromag.com/fvbdsm.html

As it happens, the same writer has a good Polyamory 101, too: http://www.xeromag.com/fvpoly.html

There are a lot of websites on BDSM, and they aren't all carefully edited or moderated; so if you can manage it, then I suggest you try to get hold of one of the above how-to books. That said... overall, one of the best online BDSM resources is FetLife.com, the kinky social networking site. Once you have an account, you can join a huge variety of discussion groups about BDSM. FetLife is not a dating site; it's more like a kinky Facebook (seriously). I think that there are important problems with how FetLife is structured. For example, there's no way to search for past topics, which is ridiculous; this means that the research process for finding discussions is incredibly weird. The BDSM activist maymay has written intelligently about many issues with FetLife: http://maybemaimed.com/2011/03/20/fetlife-considered-harmful/

But the fact remains that FetLife is a huge gathering place.

Another good online resource is the amazing sex education site Scarleteen.com.
Scarleteen offers a ton of advice on a ton of sexual topics, and has its own message boards.

The site KinkAcademy.com has received some good reviews, and features video tutorials by some people who are pretty well-known in the community. You have to buy a membership, though.

The BDSM writer Ranai from Germany has labored long and hard to make an amazingly comprehensive, international, multilingual directory of kink resources. I haven't gone through it extensively, but every time Ranai comments on my blog she's brilliant, so I'm sure her directory is brilliant too. Here's the directory: http://ranai.wordpress.com/kink-resources/

There are so many BDSM blogs that I could never count them all. I want to direct special attention to Kink Research Overviews, an abandoned but still excellent blog that profiles the sparse and scattershot research on BDSM: http://kinkresearch.blogspot.com/2009/10/

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