A travel guide is extremely useful when travelling in Shanghai. Be sure to find an up to date edition, as the city changes from year to year, and a hot restaurant one year may not even exist the next year, or may have moved to a new location.

Supplemental Reading:

Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City 1842-1949 by Stella Dong is a great account of the glamorous era of Shanghai's past.

New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China's Legendary City by Pamela Yatsko is one of the best accounts of Shanghai's recent history.

For a bit of fiction, one contemporary piece is Qiu Xiaolong's Death of a Red Heroine, a mystery about a murder in 1990s Shanghai.