Do any of the books go into detail explaining how and why successful strategies worked? Historically that is. I wouldn't expect any strategies outlined in a book to be profitable today, but I would be interested in how a strategy was formalised.
I prefer to pick that sort of thing up from mathematical texts or a textbook.
The principles are pretty simple from a probabilistic perspective: it's just a matter of making inferences from the available information and choosing an optimal course of action from that. Information theory provides a nice framework for this basis, imo.
You can find this introduction (including topics like Kelly's criterion etc) in Cover's Elements of Information Theory, a good introduction to information theory in general if you like.
