A good place to start is pretty much anything written by the rather prolific Steven Zaloga. Even Zaloga's brief Osprey Duel titles such as Panther vs Sherman: Battle of the Bulge 1944 or M4 Sherman vs Type 97 Chi-Ha: The Pacific 1945 manage to wring the most information in a concise manner. His longer books like * Armored Thunderbolt: The U.S. Army Sherman in World War II* go into greater depth than the Osprey titles. But whether long or short, Zaloga combines excellent research and trenchant insights in an efficient package.

Robert Forczyk has recently published the first volume of what is to be a two-volume study, Tank Warfare on the Eastern Front: 1941-1942 Schwerpunkt. Forczyk, a former tanker himself, brings a degree of expertise to his accounts of tank warfare. There are two deficiencies for this text. One, Forczyk has admitted he written the book for a knowledgeable audience, so he doesn't spend much time setting up the larger strategic picture as he assumes the reader has consulted the voluminous literature on Barbarossa and Blau. While this authorial decision is defensible, the text's mediocre maps is something less forgivable.

For a campaign/battle histories, The Blitzkrieg Legend: The 1940 Campaign in the West by Karl-Heinz Frieser is the official Bundeswehr study of the invasion of France. Although Frieser judges the technical shortcomings of the panzers too harshly, he manages to convey exactly how the German armored formations managed to seize the golden opportunity and achieve victory. David Glantz is a prominent historian whose use of Soviet archival evidence has greatly influenced the historiography of the Eastern Front. Unfortunately, books like his The Battle of Kursk are as dull as dishwater despite his unparalleled use of archival sources. If one can stomach Glantz's often turgid writing style (to be fair, his introductions and discussions of the strategic context are often quite lucid), you'll come out of it with a better understanding of the Eastern Front.

Heinz Guderian's autobiography, Panzer Leader, is good, since he was one of the key innovators in armoured tactics and strategy before and during WW2, eventually becoming Inspector-General of the Armoured Troops and was heavily involved in armoured development, though be wary of his personal biases and the fact that it was written in postwar Germany.

I also liked Otto Carius' Tigers in the Mud, him being one of the top tank aces of WW2 in both the Tiger tank and the Jagdtiger heavy tank destroyer. It's a very good insight into armoured warfare on the Eastern Front.

Mark Urban's The Tank War is a really good look at the British armoured forces. It follows the 5th Royal Tank Regiment, who served from the Fall of France to North Africa, then to Italy and finally to D-Day and the war in Europe. It focuses on a few men who served throughout the war, but also has a decent look at British armoured development and acquisition of American tanks via Lend-Lease as well as how the troops felt about them.