does anyone know a book that teaches you how to draw 2d sprites and tiles? any help appreciated.

Hmm.. i don't know about any books, but have you checked the tutorials in the stickies at the top of this forum? There's also Wiz7896's Sprite Tutorial if you want to check that out.

cool, i'll definitly check it out.

There's this...
http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/markov/gmaker/feldman.html
A lot of it is out of date but the colour stuff is still quite interesting.
Other Sprite Tutorials are Tsugumo 'So, you want to be a Pixel Artist' which is fantastic but the normal site is down. Do a search to see if somebody else
has hosted it.
Run the Enterbrain Pixel tutorials through google translator (as good as you'll get I'm afraid). If these were translated they would be THE pixel source...
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.enterbrain.co.jp%2Fdigifami%2Fdigiweb%2Fdot_teck%2Findex.html&langpair=ja%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools

Well, those EnterBrain Tutorials look pretty extensive, they seem to explain real well on how to do RPG sprites/tiles/animations and general techniques for shading and effects. It would have been nice if they had more details on techniques for other fields like Isometric, Sidescroller, or GUI design, etc. Its also to bad its not in english, I couldn't understand much of it at all, was like reading really bad Yoda dialog. XD