Oops. I confused the Camel book and LLama book i only got the Llama book so far, but i find SAMs (a little) more useful by now, but i am glad i got both books.
Since i got only one book from the "Teach yourself" row i could say nothing about it, but i think one could not generally say that a series of books is bad, that depends on the author ... (as i could not say that i find all the books from oreilly useful, some excellent books are from oreilly but not all are really top ...). I fully agree with you that i could sometimes imagine not what to do with all the functions of a language (even if i remember them) so it is good for me to see code in a book that uses it in a good realistic example