As Olly mentioned, you can be overwhelmed by books - although it's nice to have a reference manual .... I suppose. Actually, I've never read a photography book except on quite abstruse aspects (photomicrography, polarised mineral sections .... not your everday stuff

).
When I first got in to 35mm photography, I subscribed to
Amateur Photographer - don't know whether it's still published - that had lots of basic stuff in small doses, along with up-to-date information about
innovations and
simple expositions of age-old techniques or, indeed, novel ones such as (at the time) solarisation.
Might be worth looking at photo mags? Possibly there are publications all over the world?