I had taught myself Quantum Theory from the excellent book by J.J. Sakurai called "Modern Quantum Mechanics". Its a great book to build the conceptual foundations strongly but lacks examples.

Then I had read the 2-volume book on Quantum Mechanics by Cohen-Tanoudji et. al. This book will give enormous number of examples of using Quantum Theory especially about using two-state system formalism.

It is extremely detailed to say the least and very clear, though at times lacks the elegance of the book by Sakurai. In terms of contents it subsumes the books by Shanker or Sakurai many times over.

The trickiest part of Quantum Theory is to get grips on the theory of angular momentum and spherical harmonics and Wigner's D-matrices. This is masterfully covered in the classic book by Edmonds. The pinnacle point of this journey is to understand and use Wigner-Eckart Theorem which Sakurai also does pretty well.

One can also look at the book by Giamarchi and the books by Frank Wilczek for some sophisticated issues. Especially about understanding the subtleties that happen when one tries to do Quantum Theory in 1 and 2 spatial dimensions.