The Dance Music Manual is great--it gets you going, has several hands on synthesis tutorials, talks about the subtle differences between, say, Dub/House/DnB/French House etc. It's good for learning the fundamentals, and like you said above the Virus' included synthesis tutorial download isn't really for beginners.
I learned most of what I know about synthesis when I got my first really knobby synth(the korg RADIAS). It helped me to see all the parameters without trawling through menus. I twist this knob and this sound comes out. the korg ms2000 is a great (cheap!) knobby synth to play around with to get the basics. The Virus Polar etc. are beauties but they send you back to the menu from time to time.
Think of each section like it's a separate 'guitar pedal'--the filter box/the mixer/the effects. The oscillators are the 'guitar'. Each of these separate modules plug into each other in different orders to affect the sound--explore each module on its own with the basic raw sound of the oscillators.
'Modulation' means invisible hands turning knobs. You grab the filter cutoff knob and sweep it. *Cool* But when your hands are busy you need some extra hands to do the sweeping/tweaking. Here come the envelopes and LFOs. Both are like invisible hands that twist the knobs for you while you play.
But until you know how the basic sound of the oscillators (guitar) is affected by the modules (pedals) you can't start letting invisible hands tweak for you.
anyway--the book will help a whole lot.
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