I have 2 La Creuset dutch oven pans. They are awesome. I have a few All Clad Blacks but only use them when I'm getting all serious. Otherwise I use some decent mid grade cookware. Nonstick work good for about a year if treated with great care. You can't get them as hot as other pans or you'll damage the coating over time, not great for saute. I still have a nonstick fry pan, I guess it's a bad habit that I should get over. I have a variety of knives but only use a mid grade chef knife for everything. I dice garlic and core tomatoes with a chef knife. I would drive chefs mad on the job refusing to use pairing knives but my fine knife skills are good and I'm fast when I need to be so in the end they just let me use my chef knife and left me alone. You only "need" a chef's knife an a bread knife but there are about a million posts on the internet telling you otherwise. I like Bittman's how to cook everything as a starting place for what I'm going to make but I have a ton of cook books and a decade+ of Cooks Magazines that I go to for ideas. Cook books are there mostly for ideas.
My knife skills should be a lot better than they are but I never had any desire to excel as a mindless kitchen drone. If I had a great knife I'd do much better. I'd guess that I've spent the better part of a waking year if my life with a chef knife or meat cleaver in my hand. You can't help but get better when you have one in you hand for 30 hours of a 40-50 hour work week. At one time I worked at a restaurant that had all you could ear fajitas. No one worked that station more than two days a week because their hands would get so fucked up from holding a cleaver for hours on end. My right arm looked like Popeye's my left looked like a normal guys arm who never worked out. People would laugh at it when I'd show them. At the end of a shift I could neither open or close my right hand until the next morning. I remember the despair of the entire Harvard football team coming in for fajitas mid shift. You would be a perfectly useful kitchen drone in a week. In a month your knife skills would be way better. The competition not to suck makes people who care get better super fast.