The books can give you some ideas, but it will make very little difference unless you're playing with the ideas creatively on a regular basis.
- Fictional novel Bad Boy by Olivia Goldsmith or something was pretty good reading, not for "techniques" though, but just a good read in general.
- Secret Garden, forgot the author maybe Nancy Friday, book about womens' fantasies is also worth reading while commuting on the train or whatever. Again not a book full of techniques.
- I don't know of any books for social anxiety per say, but most psychology books written by Phd's from accredited Universities will probably contain some insightful theories. The problem is many people just get a piece of paper from some non-accredited institution so they can have PhD on the book cover and they are no more an expert than some slob living in a trailor with a 6th grade reading level. I would also make sure that the person, at the very least, received from their PhD from an accredited University (state schools or big name private schools should be easy to ID, anything else and it's suspect, if you can't find it in the America's best colleges database, it's probably a paper mill for degrees).
-I've gained some useful insight thumbing through Cosmos and reading womens' posts about relationships on other forums.
-Nothing trumps first hand experience with women and being around lots of people to really solidify thoughts and realize the diversity and sometimes jaw dropping predictability of human behavior.
-There is a ton of books on picking up women and such out there, I don't think you really need to read all of those, some of them have questionable authors and ambigious "tips", but many contain nuggets of useful information making them worthwhile. Sydnee Steele has a book called seducing your woman that's worth playing around with.