"choose books that deal with fundamental principles that remain the same"
Yes, but be careful not to get books that are too academic. Many textbooks exist which will show you how to derive all the theory, but then dedicate almost no space to applying it. One wonders if that sort of book was written simply to show people how to pass their degrees (because the exams always feature the derivations), the same way that earlier stages in education have seen learning-to-understand replaced with learning-exactly-what-will-be-in-the-exam. Horowitz and Hill is excellent in this regard, a book which actually talks about example circuits and their use, not just page on page of unapplied theory going in to ever greater detail on derivations of equations for ever more rare phenomena.
Also far too common are books which describe themselves as an overview of a field, but inside simply have a bunch of unrelated chapters by different experts all talking about very narrow sub-fields of the field. And types of books which seem to be written for "managers", they'll tell you hat the name of something is, and how to talk about it, but nothing about what it really is and how to use it. This sort of book is often filled with sections ending in "... is worthy of further study" or "experts on ... should be consulted before proceeding".
I'm not sure whether books as good as Horowitz and Hill exist for other fields, I'd like to know of them too if people can name them.