When Bad Things Happen to Good Knitters: An Emergency Survival Guide by Marion Edmonds and Ahza Moore
This is a great reference guide for a beginning knitter. There are many tips, from checking your gauge to how to go back and correct mistakes. The table of contents lists 4 main sections of tips: Emergency Prevention, or A Stitch in time; The Secret Language of Knitting Patterns; Good Knitting Gone Wrong; and Don't Let Finishing Finish You Off.
Now the tips they give in this book are great... but the book isn't organized in a way that really makes it useful as a reference. I think that this is a good book for knitters to read start to finish, but how helpful would it be on your shelf? If you know what you are doing, then you can use the glossary as a reference. If you are a beginning knitter and run into a problem, how would you know what to look up? Some of the terms are self explanatory (but then again I've been knitting for years now.)
So I think that I just talked in circles about whether or not this would make a good reference book. I recommend that you borrow it from your local library and flip through it. Let me know what you think!