How are you cleaning your pan? We don't really do anything special with ours, and we use them every day (this morning sausage in one and hash browns in the other, the night before kim chi fried rice). Usually we let it sit for a few hours to cool down, then I just pour some water in, scrub it out with a dish towel, rinse it, then dry it off immediately and put it back on the range. I've never had any crud or anything that needed scraping. There's always a layer of oil on it because we don't ever go at it with soap, although if it ever looks a little dry from the dish towel I'll put some oil on it and work it into the metal with a paper towel or something.
Also real books aren't useless

. If there's one thing that drives me nuts it's the plethora of crappy recipe databases out there web-scraping from each other. If I had to pick one must-have reading material for a cook it'd probably be Cook's Illustrated, actually. Their stuff is totally ace.