TITLE: Soft question: beginners reference to moduli spaces
QUESTION [17 upvotes]: What is a geometrically intuitive yet reasonably general first introduction to the theory of Moduli spaces?
(Possibly introducing stacks also)?
I'm looking for something which really gets the pictures across and helps build my beginners intuition.  However it should be something that is not a totally trivial read either (i mean i'd like to be able to actually use the results in that paper/ short book also).
If it helps: the direction I'm looking into the subject will primarily be from the point of view of analytic varieties and secondarily from the point of view of (schemes, or generalizations thereof (provided there is an initial introductory portion on that generalization)).

REPLY [4 votes]: For moduli I would second Geometry of Algebraic Curves, Volume II.
For a clear introduction to stacks, I like Martin Olsson's book "Compactifying Moduli Spaces for Abelian Varieties". A good motivation for studying stacks is Mumford's beautiful paper "Picard groups of moduli problems".
Also there is a book being written on stacks by several authors (Behrend, Conrad, Edidin, Fulton, Fantechi, Göttsche, Kresch) that is extremely clear: http://www.math.uzh.ch/index.php?pr_vo_det&key1=1287&key2=580&no_cache=1