Hi Laerthd,
To answer naively your question (without taking into account all the comments posted above about learning with books, that are extremely insightful), I'd say that there are three kind of go books :
-Books that explain the theoretical principles. Much text, few exercices.
-Books of exercises. Very few text, a lot of exercises.
-Books with annotated games of top players.
In the first category (theory), my reference is
Learn to Play Go vol 4 and 5. They compile, at a basic level, a panorama of all fundamental principles. The only one missing is "strategic decisions after positional judgement". Two books exist in english about Positional Judgement, one of Robert Jasiek, and one from Lee Chang-Ho, if I remember correctly. But they are essentially about
how to count properly, rather than about
what to do after that. A book exist in french, aimed at dan players, called "Chûban", by Dai Junfu, that deals with strategic decisions according to the current score. If we put it together with Learn to Play Go vol. 4 and 5, we have all the fundamentals of the go game.
Not very detailed, not thouroughly explained, but the panorama is quite complete.
The first example of fundamental that I can think about, and that would not be mentioned at all in any of these three books would be tewari, which is a notion that is a bit advanced.
In the second category, exercise books, I've got Level Up + Jump Level Up, and Speed Baduk. I had hoped that these exercises would cover all the fields of knowledge in go, but this is actually far from being true. Level Up is mostly about life and death, haengma and tesuji. Some Jôseki are thoroughly studied. But the coverage of opening theory is extremely thin, and the attack / defense notions are non-existent.
Speed Baduk is a bit more eclectic, but invasion and reduction are not at all mentioned.
They are excellent books, even if we consider the high price of Level Up, but they are not the reference collection that we are looking for.
I have made a detailed list of all the topics presented in the exercises books of my collection (including Level Up and Speed Baduk) here :
http://3141592.pio2001.online.fr/files/ ... e%20go.odsWhen I write "Vu" (="seen", in french), I mean that the topic is mentioned, but not taught through exercises. It concerns mainly the Opening as taught in Level Up : you have to put the stones on a real goban following the moves in the diagram, reading aloud the haengma, end of story.
Edit : the topic "formes", under the category "haengma", means "shapes" in french (i.e. bad shape, good shape)
I don't have enough books with commented games to talk about them.