Book to improve my cooking

I am not looking for a recipe book, but instead a book that will teach me some basics of cooking.
This can cover from kitchen hardware and the different kind of skills to use it, learn which ingredients go well together and why, what happenes (even to chemical level would be fine) to the ingredients when you cook them and why makes it taste good; these are the sort of things I'm looking for, if that makes sense.

I've always liked cooking, and I do most of it at home, but other than searching for recipes and do some little tweaking myself, I've never really tried to learn much about the whole process and improve my cooking.

Thanks.