I tend to rant about sleep in adolescents for various reasons, but other people focus on other age groups. Infants are one such group, interesting because it takes a while for their circadian rhythms to consolidate resulting in "sleeping through the night".
For years, the only serious book on the topic was Ferber, much maligned for its advice to "let them cry it out", though the rest of the book is correct and informative. Apparently, there is a good new book on the topic - The No-Cry Sleep Solution: Gentle Ways to Help Your Baby Sleep Through the Night (as well as The No-Cry Sleep Solution for Toddlers and Preschoolers by the same author, Elizabeth Pantley).
Also, Ferber has issued a new edition of his book in which he gives up on the "cry it out" strategy and gives more space to the issue of bed sharing.
What about the even newer (and similar in tone to Pantley) Mary Sheedy Kurcinka's Misbehaving in America: Is Your Child Misbehaving or Missing Sleep?
Hey, I like the Ferber book. Maybe my kid is an angel, since I never was forced to any choices about 15 minutes of crying, but any crying she does to do seems more about being mad that she's not falling asleep than anything else.
On the other hand, the no-cry sleep solution methods seem to wear my wife out and make her cry.
I'll have to check out Kurcinka's book.
When my son was still breast feeding he slept with his mom and I at night and rarely woke up. It worked well for regulating his sleep - he was on a pretty steady pattern right off the bat, or at least after the first week, in which he slept 18-20 hours a day. Kind of a stark contrast from my own insomnia.