Joy of Cooking is more generally helpful: want to try a new cut of meat and don't know how to cook it? Joy will list the ways that meat can be cooked and what it does to the taste and texture of the food and then gives you wonderful changeable recipies if you need to even look any up. Other cookbooks, I have found, tend to say, "in this recipie you roast the meat, in this one you fry it."

I like also just reading Joy; it's one of the best cookbooks for actual education about food I've seen (I've read a lot of cookbooks; it's an occupational hazard for the kind of person who always needs to read something in the morning and often doesn't have a new book in the house).