I think you're thinking of digital-tutors. They had a tutorial to create a hover-bike or something. They have a subscription based model now, where you pay per month or year and have access to all the tutorials. This is also a good site for tutorials, some free, some to purchase.

As for books, I can't really recommend any at the moment. I had Autodesk's Foundation for Maya 2009, which was mediocre. I'm sure other people have recommended books. If you do a search on the forums, I think there's a few other threads that visit the topic of good books.