It sort-of sounds like you want a book that describes the typical peripherals of a microcontroller (UART, SPI, I2C, A2D, PWM, etc) in a way that explains what they do and how to use them, without getting bogged down in elementary explanations of the usual software techniques. So that given a typical datasheet example like:
/* Set frame format: 8data, 2stop bit */
UCSR0C = (1<<USBS0)|(3<<UCSZ00);You'd like to find a book that describes "What is a stop bit and why would I want two of them" rather than explanations of shift and bitwise Or operators.
Or maybe "What's the difference between I2C, SPI, and USART, anyway?" and "It's nice that this peripheral has about a billion different possible configurations - how about some hint as to which ones are most commonly used, and why?"
Sometimes you can find this in datasheets, or app notes, or in white papers from the original "inventor" of a protocol (I2C, for instance.) Once you're past the first couple of chips, the datasheet might be enough. (But those first couple of chips it would be nice to have something more ... tutorial. Lesson-like.)
Unfortunately, I don't really know of any books like that. You used to find tutorials in magazines like Byte and Kilobaud, back when microcomputer users needed to know all about their HW *and* their SW, and didn't know either starting out. Nowadays, the HW and SW knowledge is more separated. :-(