I'm sure there are, but I can personally attest to the quality of those two. The French one in particular is just astonishingly well-executed that I would recommend looking at it if you were interested in techniques. The "magic" of it is in the composition: each chapter, you read a little description of a new grammatical concept, you work through various related sentences with help, and suddenly you're reading a whole French text composed of those past sentences and able to answer comprehension-related questions. It just builds and builds like that to great complexity.

What always makes learning to read easier is that time is completely in your control. The principle is pretty straightforward: if you have enough time and patience, you can read anything (with a dictionary, grammar book etc) and the more you read in that language the less time it starts to take. These books basically just bootstrap the process.

I mentioned it above, but the other way is if you have a book or article you really know well in your mother tongue that exists in a language you want to learn, just patiently try and read it in that language. I think programmers actually have a bit of an advantage in this, as it's really just pattern recognition -- and it isn't that different from trying to understand a program in a language you haven't worked with before.