I recall when I took biology in high school, we used the well-regarded Biology textbook, written by Campbell. Another example might be Kernighan & Ritchie's The C Programming Language.

My discipline is Electrical Engineering, focused in integrated circuit design. I find that there are often a few competing textbooks, and some of them are stronger in their explanations. Razavi's Design of Analog CMOS Integrated Circuits for example, is considered the best at explaining complex topologies using intuition, rather than complete mathematical rigor.

A book you find many junior electrical engineering students posessing is Sedra & Smith's Microelectronics, which in my honest opinion, is great for explaining operational amplifiers and simple topologies of single transistor amplifiers, but the latter chapters are much better explained (and notated) by a multitude of other authors, Razavi included.

The reason I ask is because I was considering taking a biochemistry course, and they use a hefty looking text that also has a highly descriptive name as other "bibles," simply called Principles of Biochemistry.

as in the title. Be it textbooks, bios or anything else. Somewhere I've heard that a couple of books in a given subject can give you quite a good understanding of it.
It does not have to be a niche either; I am interested in hearing about your favourite general psychology or biotechnology books just as well; I hope we can exchange recommendations about how to dive into a given field.

For me, I'd say that to get a taste of Computer Science from the metal to high level concepts, I'd go with:

• Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen et al. - for many it's bible of algorithms designs, I also enjoyed it very much (and I like to think that it was not only because of widespread aclaim)
• CODE by Petzhold - for people who like to understand every part of the system they build; it goes through the process of building a computer, starting with logic gates and ending with fully working Turing machine.