Card College is great as well but it's pretty expensive to buy all of the volumes. From what I've heard, it'll teach you just about everything you'd ever need to know about card magic. I'm not sure how true this is but I haven't heard anything negative about it.
If you mastered everything in all five volumes, you would be one of the top card magicians in the world. If you just get the first two volumes and master them, you would have all of the fundamentals down.
I have paul harris books the art of astonishments, and as effects I have svengali,gaff,invisible deck and any other classic gimmicked decks, I have a budget between 50-80$ also I want to learn more advanced stuff with normal deck of cards.
What do you perform out of Art of Astonishment? There is a tremendous amount of great effects in those books.
My recomendation is to pick up Card College Volumes 1 and 2. They provide the building blocks for the later books.
-Royal Road to Card Magic
-Expert Card Technique
-Expert at the Card Table (although this one can be difficult to understand at times)
-Mark Wilson's Complete Course has card tricks among many other tricks so if you want to dabble in all sorts of magic, I highly recommend this book.
If you want to get a bunch of older books which are less expensive, get what Anthony recommends plus:
~ Arthur Buckley's Card Control
~ Jerry Mentzler's Counts, Cuts, Moves and Subtleties
~ Hugard's Encyclopedia of Card Tricks
~ Hugard and Braue's Expert Card Technique
~ Scarne on Card Tricks
~ Paul LePaul's The Card Magic of LePaul
