Quite many of the older books aren't obsolete even if they were written for older maya versions. You may not be able to follow them exactly step-by-step but if you understand the principles of the method in question you can adapt the idea to 4.5.
I recently purchased Maya: Secrets of the Pros. Very good book. It's not a newbie guide and not even a step-by-step tutorial guide but it talks about different technics and concepts in an interesting way. Every chapter is written by different Maya master. For example Habib Zargarpour (hope I spelled that right) talks about particle effects created for the Perfect Storm movie.
*correction*
There are some hands on tutorials in the book, but what I meant was that they don't go through every single step that a newbie would except...
Last edited by kbrown; 21-11-2002 at 10:09 AM.