Do I really need to know that?

An afternoon reviewing another C# book felt, yet again, like running in snowdrift. Typical with these kind of books, the first few chapters smother you in infrastructure pedantry, acronyms and background. If I needed to build an average house, would I really, really need to know the history of the lumber industry? The molecule structure of concrete? No. I need to learn how to build a house quickly, efficiently and inexpensively. Similarly, detailed information on the CTS, CLR and FCL are not needed to get a grounding in C#. This is what appendii were invented. Stick all the stuff that people don't need up front into the back of the book where they might need it once they finish reading the book.
This front-loading poses a problem because newbies tend to read the first few chapters very carefully. Each section is carefully scrutinized and digested. But then they discover that the information they spent so much brain power absorbing, isn't actually useful. There is no way to determine the quality or usefulness of information presented in the early stages. By the end of the third chapter, the reader thinks 'Ok...I think I got that, the Common Language Runtime sits on top of the OS, the Framework Class Library is above that for IO and streaming, then there's ADO.Net with XML and whatnot and then my application runs on top of that again' But NONE of this will definitely help you write a program. It's information and often it is interesting but it is not helpful information that leads a developer to realizing their own educational goal . I DON'T CARE how Microsoft layers its development environment because I can't do anything about it - it's out of my sphere of control. What I can control is an application. Show me how to develop quickly, efficiently and show me how C# solves common programming problems.
The volume of information is already overwhelming so why do authors make life difficult for newbies by being overly academic? Why do programming books, in the main, focus on the complexities of the language infrastructure rather than on adaptive, simple application development?
If you know of good development books that break the pedantic paradigm, post 'em here.