Understanding Malts and Steeping Grains

I am at the point in brewing where I want to stary making my own recipes as opposed to copying someone elses. I plan on staying extract. If anyone can recommend a good resource (website or book) that would help me understand whats going into my beer (malt, grains, etc) and why its there, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks.

Go on amazon.com & check out the brewing books. Not sure which one would explain all the malts & such. Too many of them coming out nowadays for print to keep up. I like to read descriptions on websites like midwest for hops,grains,extracts,etc. Then learning to understand SRM,IBU,etc will help give you more information that the descriptions give. There are some in the stickies here too that you'll find usefull.

Designing Great Beers by Ray Daniels is a good one for this. There is a section on individual ingredients then the bulk of the book breaks down beers by style, telling what ingredients and percentages are typically included in each. The only thing I don't like is it doesn't include Belgian styles. For that Brew Like a Monk is good, and there is a recipe section in the back that breaks down grain bills for certain styles kind of the way Daniels does in his book.