Reddit reviews Paul Bocuse: The Complete Recipes (Langue anglaise)

• Taste of Home Best Loved - A great down-to-earth cookbook with homestyle meals that mom and grandma used to make.
  
• The Silver Spoon - Originally in Italian, hundreds of awesome, authentic Italian dishes using a massive array of ingredients.
  
• Gourmet Magazine Cookbook - I got my copy at a brick and mortar bookstore many years ago, and it may be out of print now. But it is full of elevated dishes that are easily obtainable at home.
  
• Dinner for Two - For years it was just my wife and I. This was the perfect little cookbook for us. Additionally, ATK has a similar cookbook. This isn't the one we have, but one like it. It's basically their recipes scaled down for two people.
  
• Bocuse Gastronomique - It's like an awesome cooking class on paper from the master himself.
  
• Bocuse - An awesome collection of recipes from Paul Bocuse.
  
• ATK Cookbook. I probably cook more from here than any other. I used to buy the new version every year with the newest recipes, but now I have the online subscription.
  
• The Flavor Bible that someone else linked.
  
  
  I could keep going but I should stop. So many great ones out there.

Agree with /u/X28.

Andrea's book should be considered as a primary text for Vietnamese cooking (much like David Thompson's Thai Food for Thai, or Paul Bocuse: The Complete Recipes for French).

Luke's books are great (as well as his shows that sort of accompany the books, or the other way around).

I am a professional chef and while watching people prepare food is entertaining and sometimes also educating I actually recommend you to buy books and learn the basics first.

You can then use youtube pretty well in order to watch how to do specific things, like i.e. deboning a whole chicken for a gallantine, or how to trim certain pieces of meat.

Start with french cuisine. Once you have understood how things are connected you'll actually understand everything else.

If you want something simple and entertaining for the start I'd choose Anthony Bourdaine's Les Halles Cookbook. It's amusingly written and the recipes are fairly easy and they are all legit.

Then there is Paul Bocus. Living legend with three long-term girlfriends.

And of course you want to have Escoffier at your home. Doesn't get much more classic than that.

If you want to get a sense of what drives a top notch chef, watch In Search of Perfection by Heston Blumethal. Very very good stuff.

And finally, if you want to learn something about culinary history I highly highly recommend Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany and to learn about our lifes as a chef you need to read the (admittedly exaggerated) autobiographicly Kitchen Confidential by Bourdain.

All this provided, you won't learn cooking without actually doing it.

Edit: Depending on your budget, I also heavily recommend Alain Ducasse's Grand Livre de Cuisine.

Larousse Gastronomique

Mastering the Art of French Cooking - Julia Child

Paul Bocuse:The Complete Recipies

I'm cooking my way through The Complete Bocuse.

I would look at this book:
Paul Bocuse: The Complete Recipes https://www.amazon.com/dp/208020095X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_rkkjybM2R3694
It contains many recipes for traditional French dishes like onion soup, sole meunière, bœuf bourguignon.
As far as techniques go, I found this book to be the best:
The Professional Chef https://www.amazon.com/dp/0470421355/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_vmkjybW84N5YZ
Especially the section on stocks. It also has a lot of French recipes.