America's Test Kitchen comes from the folks of Cook's Illustrated magazine (THE best cooking mag on the market), and part of what makes them so great is that they start out with the product they want to achieve (chewy chocolate chip cookies, for example) and fiddle around until they get it perfect. They also detail what they tried and why it did (or didn't) work. About 4 pages are spent on each recipe, a great thing if you want to understand WHY you should use certain techniques. And if you don't, you can skip all that and get right to making perfect food. My suggestion is to leaf through each book in this series to find the recipes that most appeal to you. While I refer to some of my more techinical cookbooks when I need to fix recipes, it's the America's Test Kitchen series I turn to for new ideas.
( )