First off, you will never find a game programming book that will specifically cover "making things explode." The purpose of the books is to teach you the general concepts of programming interactive media, not spoon-feed answers to it's readers. Making things explode is something that howto authors expect the reader to figure out on their own using the general concepts discussed in the book. For example, if a book discusses rigid body physics you can use that general info to make an explosion by instantiating smaller models of the vehicle's parts (body, wheels, engine, what have you) and apply an initial velocity to each part based on the car's last speed. Add a few particles and some spiffy sound effects and whammo! You have a car exploding.
So I am also looking for graphics information on how to ad a decal to my Texture at rune-time without having to make new Textures
Even though this seems a simple enough task, depending on how you want to do this you will need quite a bit of math. First, using a completely transparent "overtexture," you will have to use some fancy formulas to correspond where the mouse/pointer/whatever is over your model to the UV coordinates on the texture. If you want to have part-by-part coloring options (color the door, hood, et cetera), you could have a simple checklist of each part and corresponding color (and simply change the hue of certain parts of the texture). For decals, you will need to find the UV coordinates as stated above and apply the decal in real-time. A little complicated, to be sure, but easy enough for an intermediate programmer to be able to work out. Then, there's directly painting the cars. Not only will you have to calculate the UV coordinate relations with the model, but also skew the paint zone depending on the angle of the camera. If the user sees a circular brush icon, but are looking at the car at a forty-five degree angle, just drawing a circle at the coordinates would produce undesireable results: To fit the brush shape, the new shape would have to be an ellipse!
. . . I guess all I'm really trying to say here is that you can't expect books to address your needs specifically: Just use trial and error to make your own solution that's tailored to your own needs.