Interestingly I'm finding it harder and harder to find good howtos. Most of them offer too little, too specogic topic, or vaguely generic examples.

Yeah, the tldp is way out of date but still comes up high in web searches.

I use Fedora/Centos/Redhat mostly and I find the best quality docs are on

    arch linux wiki
    Fedora site
    stackexchange
    Ubuntu answers

You can also get the official Redhat docs if you sign in. I'm pretty sure it's free.

I definitely agree. Book publishing, in my opinion, needs to shift to meet the changing needs of readers. Many tech book publishers continue to publish the way they have for the last 20+ years but the world has changed. We don't need more, poorly written and poorly edited documentation. We need better books.

Lots of data, but not much information. Before, tech books were an oasis because there wasn't much of anything anywhere. Now it is the opposite, too much of everything everywhere, I need someone to condense it down into a form I can use.

That can change; it depends on the publisher's perspective and goals. Our goal is always to publish fewer better books. (I stole that line from Prentice Hall. They forgot it years ago. :)