Bibliography to a novice ...

[Jean-Francois Jadouin]

The most-often cited reference I know of, and one you should definitely read is:
J. McClelland, D. Rumelhart, Parallel Distributed Processing vols 1 & 2, MIT press, 1986.

The following is a pretty complete collection of the most influential papers in the field,
Anderson, Rosenfeld, Neurocomputing, foundations of research, MIT press, 1989.

Both these references are from memory and may be a little off - my apologies for this.

Oh yes: Artificial Intelligence (# 40, I think), had a special issue on learning, where
Hinton wrote a good introduction on connectionist learning procedures.

Good luck !
jfj