I potty-trained my son directly on the toilet by using a toilet ring and a footstool. I find it's by far the easiest way to do it: no mess, no cleaning, and then no transition from potty to regular toilet.
As for book, I trained him in less than a day (for real), with the book Toilet Training in Less Than a Day, by Nathan Azrin (http://www.amazon.com/Toilet-Training-Less-Than-Day/dp/06... on amazon).
It was written in the 70's in British English, so some of the wording is odd or a tad sexist, but it works amazingly well. It was a lot of fun for my son to do, no tears, no pressure, and by the end of the day he was indeed toilet-trained - and able t go by himself!
He refused to do a #2 in the toilet for a couple of weeks (he didn't have a bowel movement when we did the training) but he would ask for a pull-up, we'd put it on, then put it off when he was done, and that was it.
Since then I've recommended it to quite a few moms I know, and all have had similar experiences - minus the #2 issue, it seems my son was an exception in that, most kids were going for everything by the end of the day. You do have to follow the method pretty exactly, though. A couple of mothers wanted to be creative and changed some parts of it, and it didn't work as well.