First I must admit,  I do enjoy reading textbooks.  In-fact, I tend to highlight while reading them.

Over the holidays I read the book: 

Feature Extraction & Image Processing for Computer Vision, Third Edition

http://www.amazon.com/Feature-Extraction-Processing-Computer-Edition/dp/0123965497/ref=dp_ob_title_bk

This book provides a solid introduction to computer vision(CV) and modern CV algorithms.  All the algorithms are supported with MATLAB examples making it easy to experiment (if you have MATLAB).  

The chapters covering high-level feature extraction and object description provide a solid foundation in the meat of computer vision.  I also enjoyed the appendix on Principal Component Analysis.

I get asked all the time, "what is the best book to get up to speed on computer vision?".  I highly recommend the above described book.