I need to know some software for one of my team members so that he can start learning to create 3d animations and things for 3d games. I know I''ll again need books but what program would you suggest and what books would you recommend for it?

If you have the cash, both 3d studio max and maya are great programs. For textures,maps,etc you might like a copy of photoshop.

Of course there are also free/shareware tools out there.
Truespace, blender, and others. For textures/2d you have paint shop pro, Gimp, and a few others.

If you have the cash, lightwave is another good one to look into. However IMHO, it seems to be a lot more oriented for rendering animations than creating models and animations and exporting them to use in a game. It does make awesome renderings though in a very small amount of time (when i rendered a simple animation on both it and 3d studio max, lightwave went 2x as fast and looked much better, could just be an anomoly though)
On a tight budget, you could get a copy of Ray Dream Studio 5 off of ebay pretty cheap i think, although last I checked the freeware modelers are almost as good as it (might be better by now)