Basics cookbooks are very good books, to begin with. These books tend to explain terminology and techniques, as well as providing samples of simple but essential recipes. You can learn a lot from even just one such book, and then graduate onto cookbooks that seem like favorites to you.
When reading a cookbook, check out how recipes are written and look for the basic terms and methods. Also notice that particular types of food (for example, bread, soup, meat, cake, etc.) have specific requirements in common to many recipes within that type of food.
