Not sure this is the right place to ask this, but since you've been discussing a couple of art books I was wondering if anyone has anything to say on this one:
Digital Fantasy Painting Workshop by McKenna, Martin (2004)
I was checking whether I could find the others you mentioned (including the IFX one) from a swedish online bookshop, and I could. There were a lot of others as well (some costing around a 100 dollars a piece *chokes*) but this one seemed it could be interesting. That swedish bookshop just never describe the books in any detail so it's hard to decide whether they're worth the buy... Also, the above book seemed to exist with two different covers. They were still from the same year and by the same artist, but maybe the binding differed. Forgot to check. The price did, at any rate :P
*checked binding: nope no difference there. Same page count too...