I'm beginning to find the tenor of this discussion somewhat strange.
The OP is requesting information about good books on TKD. Increasingly, the posts in response seem to have be carrying the message, 'don't read anything! Just do what your instructor says'. No matter how much critical intelligence someone has brought to bear on some aspect of the art, you keep that book shut and just follow instructions!
I compare this attitude to that which my colleagues and I apply to our students, both undergraduate and graduate level. If a student comes to me to ask for extra reading on a topic, even a technically pretty tough one, we are happy to give them that reading, and to encourage them to try to absorb what's in that literature and try it out in practice. By the same token, some of the very best work being done in my field, and others currently, is being done by brilliant graduate students who haven't yet started on their Ph.D.s even, but who've made fundamental discoveries. And I know, from friends who teach in the math and physics departments, that they same is true over there. No one would dream of telling these student, don't read in other areas or do exactly what I tell you without reflecting on it; it's precisely the reconstruction of the subject matter in the mind of the student who bring new knowledge to bear on old problems that leads to breakthroughs.
We have a lot of Asian students in our department and they often come to us with deferential attitudes from their own backgrounds that we try to rid them of as quickly as possible, because that sort of attitude ultimately inhibits the kind of thinking that leads to new knowledge and important discoveries. We like to get them to challenge the canonical sources we give them to read at every point. Making a career for yourself in any serious field depends, in part, on developing that kind of critical thinking. That's something that the European and North American education system stresses, and it's paid off handsomely—as vs. rote mimicry—in every domain it's been tried in. You don't simply hand the student a stack of books and say, go ahead, read these and then tell me about quantum field theory or the evolution of formal logic; you interact with them, supervise them and press them on what they know (and think they know)—but to tell students, 'Don't read anything different from what I tell you until you're on your second or third postdoc' would be absurd.
I know quite a few people in the MAs and I don't know one who thinks you can learn the art from a book. I've yet to meet a student who thinks that, either. Books supply your own critical thinking about what you're doing with grist for the mill. They can be immensely useful as reference guides (some better than others, obviously), as illustrations of methods of analysis, as presentations of history—all subject to challenge, of course, but out there, to be thought about and discussed Lectures and demonstrations, in academic or martial disciplines, are an important part of the story, but an education in these things requires much more than that, and I think books and other resources play an essential role in education regardless of the domain...
