I've learned the most and gotten the most bang for the buck from using Cook's Illustrated special edition magazines. For example, Skillet Dinners1[1], my copy of which is well worn. The writeups that go with the recipes really help train one's intuition about cooking. Over time, I've gotten much better at knowing when to adjust ingredients or cooking times for a given recipe.
The best part of ATK and related Cook's country is they also helpfully go in-depth about the why. This helps you understand why the steps are laid out how they are. Plus it helps they test the crap out of their recipes so even with minor variation you can get a stellar end result.
My only complaint is sometimes they are way more steps and more exspensive sets of ingredients than other recipes. But often it's worth it for vastly superior results.
That's why I liked Serious Eat's Food Lab where Kenji also breaks stuff down but in an accessible set of recipes. Similar to Alton Brown's Good Eats, also a great resource if you like understanding the chemistry going on in your cooking!
ATK is great for beginners because they test their recipes and their recipe amounts are literally the same as they used in the tests.
A lot of recipes you find online are really guestimates on the amounts, so you never get the same result as the author. People are very bad about guestimating volumes, like "about 2 tablespoons of oil" when they really used half a cup.
Heh, I run into a lot of recipes where they have you cook in a tiny amount of oil and dump the pan out a couple times but you're still supposed to be "sautéing" whatever's in the last batch. Yeah, OK. Double the initial oil, add it again after each dump since there's still none left after the first time. Or else we're not doing what you claim we're doing, recipe. Which may also be fine, but still.
Or high-heat nonstick cooking with like one teaspoon of oil in the pan, heating it to nigh-smoke before adding anything else. LOL. Or steel or cast-iron temp + fat combos that make no sense and are guaranteed to give you a bad time. Either lots and lots of recipes are nonsense on this front, requiring modification of one form or another to be reasonable, or these people have magical pans that I do not.
A lot of the time I'll see recipes call for heating non-stick on a medium- or medium-high flame with so little fat in ("one teaspoon of oil" or some similarly-way-under-enough quantity) them that it only covers like 1/4 or less of the pan surface, so most of the pan is heating dry, which AFAIK is a great way to turn the coating into a gas that's fairly bad for you. Though maybe that's folk-wisdom and it's actually fine to heat a nonstick pan empty? IDK.
https://shop.americastestkitchen.com/special-issues/cook-s-i...