After moving back to Virginia in 2005, I jumped wholeheartedly back into trout fishing.  As a new guy to the area, I looked for guidance and immediately found it with a quick search on Amazon.  The following books have been very helpful in scouting locations and orienting my fishing activities:

• Virginia Blue-Ribbon Streams - Murray
• Trout Streams of Virginia - Harry Stone
• Guide to Maryland Trout Fishing - Gelso / Coburn
• Flyfisher's Guide to Virginia - Hart
• Virginia Fishing Guide - Gooch

To these, you can add the internet. Easy searches, like - "White oak canyon" trout - turn up plenty of advice.  Of course, you need to add the various state sites sponsored by the departments of natural resources as well as links you can obtain off of the established forums, like WVAngler.com.

So, what's good in terms of the books?

I found that all of the books were reliable resources with the huge nod going to the Gelso/Coburn book followed by the Flyfisher's Guide.  Without a doubt, Gelso's book is tops.  The challenge is that it is not readily available on Amazon or the other major book sellers.  In fact, the only consistent source of this document is Bass Pro Shops in Arundel Mills.  They always have a stack of them back in the Fly Shop.

The Flyfisher's Guide is available on Amazon and is part of a comprehensive series of the same name by state.  Hart does a great job of covering all the water in Virginia as well as portions of West Virginia.  Like Gelso, his directions are accurate and you can find your way to a stream based on his guidance.

Virginia Blue Ribbon and Trout Streams of Virginia are niche books.  While I use them, I only use them to expand on the information in the other books.  They do have decent directions, have great color pictures and do provide information on what to use.  The real issue with them is that they only have a limited number of locations.  I would decide where to go based on Flyfisher and, only then, go look at these other two.

The Virginia Fishing Guide is huge, has a bunch of entries, but is out of date.  The rules and access have changed on some of the locations.  Since it is huge, you can use this to find a location and then do further research to understand how to get there and whether it is still public.  I mainly used this guide to find bass.  Caveat!  My copy is from 1988.  The current version is 1998 - so be careful which one you get - I bought mine just last year.  Hopefully, the 1998 version does not have the currency issues that my version does... but, it is still 10 years back.

And that becomes an overall caution.  Check the publication date of the book and use it with caution.  Try and validate key info using the internet where you can get real time feedback.

As you move into Spring and start to make your plans, those are the references I would recommend.