My advice for cooking is to choose a cookbook intended for beginners that includes a lot more information than just recipes (eg, the Joy of Cooking). This might generalize to other fields. The concept of a recipe is so clear that it’s easy for a beginner to recognize a book doing something else; this may not be so easy in other fields, even if the beginner thinks to look—and people don’t seem to look for cooking instruction beyond recipes.
My advice for cooking is to choose a cookbook intended for beginners that includes a lot more information than just recipes (eg, the Joy of Cooking). This might generalize to other fields. The concept of a recipe is so clear that it’s easy for a beginner to recognize a book doing something else; this may not be so easy in other fields, even if the beginner thinks to look—and people don’t seem to look for cooking instruction beyond recipes.