Backcountry Skiing: Skills for Ski Touring and Ski Mountaineering is to Backcountry Betty as Einstein is to Imus. Where BB is destined for trash heaps and second-hand bookstores everywhere the only time anyone will ditch their copy of BS is when a revised edition comes out.
BS is an awesomely complete reference to everything its title indicates. Targeted at "intermediate to advanced in-area skiers" but accessible to all skill levels, the book's ten chapters cover all the gear and techniques you'll need to be better at everything. The authors' lofty goal is to bring it all together "in one place," and they pull it off in spades.
Choosing and fitting skins? Nine pages. Assessing avalanche danger? Forty-seven pages. It's all there, with the notable exception of navigation: for some reason this subject is given very short shrift, but at 339 pages I guess something had to give. Backcountry Skiing exemplifies the highest level of quality that I've come to expect from the Mountaineers Outdoor Expert Series of books. A no-brainer: buy it and read it.