Recommender systems is a very nice topic and has some really nice tutorials and courses on the internet.
One of my favorites is Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran (2007) which gives a hands on implementation of basic recommender systems(in Python). This book would help you get comfortable with the basic concepts.
This paper by Linden et al. (2011) explains the item based collaborative filtering algorithm of Amazon.
This is a really nice introductory course on recommender systems, on Coursera.
This is also a very nice book for getting started at recommender systems, which takes the reader from a beginner to an expert level. Here is the link to it on Springer (publication website of the book)
But, I recommend you start with the "Programming Collective Intelligence" book, so that you can get an idea about converting the recommender systems algorithms into code, which would help you in translating(into code) the concepts in the other resources too.
Linden, G., Smith, B., and York, J. (2003). Amazon. com recommendations: Item-to-item collaborative filtering. Internet Computing, IEEE, 7(1), 76-80.
Ricci, F., Rokach, L., Shapira, B., and Kantor, P.B. (2011). Introduction to Recommender Systems Handbook. Springer.
Segaran, T. (2007). Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications. O'Reilly.