Self-reliance is a subject that attracts a great deal of theory and rather less carpentry. P. Joseph Richards goes the other way about it. Off-Grid Survival Projects for Beginners is filed under home and garden precisely because that is where it belongs: the concern is building things, not imagining scenarios.
The beginner framing is honest rather than marketing. Projects of this sort live or die on whether the instructions can be followed by someone who has never attempted them before, and a guide that assumes no prior competence proves far more useful than one written to impress the already skilled.