The first JavaScript book I bought was the worst technology book I've ever seen. It seemed like a good idea in the book store; it had some examples of things I wanted to do so I chose it over the few others on the shelf and took it home. It didn't take me long to see the problem: the book was little more than some code examples surrounded by filler to flesh it out to book-sized. No theory, no language reference, nothing that I couldn't copy&paste from any number of sites on the web. I made sure that the next book I bought was more of a reference book and less of a waste of paper.
The book I bought a week later was a massive improvement. At least, it was at the time. It told me everything I needed to know about the (more-or-less) current (at the time) version of the language it was written for and it was either on my desk or in my bag for about a year. And then it was hopelessly outdated.
It took me a while, but I finally came to realize that books that are heavy on ideas and light on code end up having a longer shelf-life and making more of an impact. Books about tools are needed, but books that teach the "why" are so much better because, unlike those VB5.0 and .NET 1.0 books, theory changes slowly and incrementally. That is why some books are timeless. That is why some books with no code at all are constantly listed in developers' list of "must reads". Knowledge and theory never goes out of style, unless you stop improving on it.
I recently worked with a developer on a project and I would occassionally approach him with problems I was having. He has been a developer for much longer than me and has absolutely no experience with the languages I was using for my part of the project. He was coding in RPG, I was using T-SQL. However, he was able to help me out almost every time I was stuck because of his knowledge of theory and computer science in general. That type of knowledge is powerful, more powerful than knowledge of any single (or group of) languages or tools will ever be.
When Frans says "Do not read just code, learn algorithms," you should listen to him. When someone recommends a Java development book, check it out even if you're not coding Java. And when Mike Gunderloy publishes a book, buy it.
Mike's Coder To Developer is a perfect example of ideas over code. Reading the book is like hanging out with someone while they work, discussing what they are doing, why they are doing it that way, what other ways it could be done, and the merits of the alternatives. The book follows Mike as he creates a piece of software from idea to completion. As he walks us through the process, he explains options we have and why you might choose those options (i.e. price, size of the project, time constaints, features, etc). That type of information is so much more important than the code for the software and the ideas in the book heavily outweigh the code. So when .NET 2.0 is released, the code may be outdated but the book will not be (at least not nearly as badly or as quickly). The fact that he uses C# is a plus but it wouldn't make the book any less great if he didn't. The code isn't the reason for the book, the ideas are what matters.