Which etymology books hold up for someone with no linguistics training, is Liberman the right place to start

I bought one of those thousand fascinating word origins hardbacks as a present and then read it myself and it was full of the exact stories this room exists to debunk. The tell in the shop is the absence of dates. A book that gives you first attestation dates and says which language the word came through is doing etymology. A book that gives you an anecdote about a tavern in 1690 and no citation is doing entertainment, and there is nothing wrong with that except that people repeat it at dinner.

Liberman's Word Origins and How We Know Them is a method book, not a reference, and that is exactly what you are asking for. It came out with Oxford in 2005 and the subtitle is Etymology for Everyone, which is honest: it walks you through how etymologists reason, what counts as evidence, and why so many popular origins fail. His Origin Uncertain from 2024 is more of the same in essay form and is the more entertaining read. What he is not is a dictionary you look words up in, although he did write An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology, which is a specialist thing and not what you want at this stage. He also writes a long running etymology column for the Oxford University Press blog, which is free and a good way to try his voice before buying anything.

For actual lookups, keep the reference layer separate from the reading layer. The Oxford English Dictionary is the thing that matters if you can get access, and a lot of public library cards give you free remote access, which people constantly forget. Below that, the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology edited by Onions and the Barnhart or Chambers dictionary of etymology are both compact one volume references that are properly sourced. Etymonline is genuinely useful and free, but understand what it is: Douglas Harper compiling and summarising published scholarship, so it is a very good index into the literature rather than an independent authority. When it and the OED disagree, the OED is the one with the citation slips behind it.

Method book first, reference second, and use a library for the OED. That order saves you the most money and the most embarrassment.

Slight disagreement with going straight to Liberman. He is excellent but he is arguing with the field as much as explaining it, and if you have no background the arguments are more fun once you know what the consensus positions are. I would read a general history of English first, almost any of the standard popular ones, then Liberman, and you will get much more out of him because you will recognise what he is pushing against.