There's tons of books about all the techniques you can use. When you understand some of the basic techniques, it's apparent what techniques are being used when you read a cook book. The problem is, even if you only got as technical as saying "make a velouté sauce" in half the cookbooks you see, then people would freak out if you didn't tell them how.
When you learn the fundamental techniques, you can easily extrapolate them and realize half the recipes you read in your cookbooks are (necessarily) overcomplicated and can be reduced (no pun intended) to a few techniques.
Jacque Pépin is an good resource for beginners and intermediate cooks to learn french techniques. You can find techniques online and in his book New Complete Techniques. The CIA book is good, but a big gripe with the CIA book and the FCI/ICC book (Fundamental Techniques of Classic Cooking) is that the portions are pretty huge because they are for professional chefs and caterers. That aside, they are still a good resource for learning that. IIRC the James Peterson "Cooking" book is pretty good at basic techniques.
The Joy of Cooking is still one of my favorites, because the recipes are basic (but delicious), and because it's a compendium of recipes, it builds on itself more than nearly every cookbook you can find. So the recipes include in the ingredients do say "2 cups béchamel (Page 400)", and you can backtrack to that recipe and learn.
One problem with these books people don't usually like is the basic recipe isn't often fancy enough to be novel. It's kind of up to the cook to understand "Oh Coca-Cola would be a good substitute for the acid and sugar here" or "maple syrup would be better than brown sugar here" or whatever.
For that, it's nice to have McGee's "On Food and Cooking", as it goes into details about ingredients you've never really thought about.