I hate books with contents like that too - I've read about those things many times already and unless the language I'm currently learning really does something interesting in one of those areas reading whole paragraphs of text on them is just a waste of time. I'm recently learning Forth, and I really do appreciate more detailed explanations, because holy cow, that's some really crazy shit going on :) However, for languages and technologies closer to mainstream - or just similar to what I already know - I use these web sites for an intro:
And then go straight to the most advanced books I can find. It saves me a lot of time and it's more fun than following yet another book structured in exactly the same way, with pages and pages of text about minor syntactical differences and rare interesting things buried deep inside the book.
http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code
http://learnxinyminutes.com/
http://hyperpolyglot.org/
And then go straight to the most advanced books I can find. It saves me a lot of time and it's more fun than following yet another book structured in exactly the same way, with pages and pages of text about minor syntactical differences and rare interesting things buried deep inside the book.