Hi!
How old is your book? I have been working with Maya since Maya2014 and I don't think the Joint Orient interface has changed in any way since then.
If you want to orient your joints to xyz with *secondaryAxisOrientation* set to none, you simply go into the joint orient menu, (Rigging Toolset, Skeleton->Orient Joint) and set your Primary axis as "X" and set the secondary axis to "None".
The *orientJointToWorld* option is generally only used for the last joint in a chain, it basically tells the joint to see it's direct parent as the world orientation and to orient itself to match the same rotationspace. Because Joint orientation is always relative to the next joint in the chain, so this is handy if you want the last joint in your chain oriented correctly since it has no child to orient towards.
Your book probably talks about "xyz" because you also should set the *rotateOrder* attribute on your Joint to xyz, if you choose X as your main axis, to avoid unnecessairy gimballock problems. Or because they take their information from the coding side of things where orienting a joint like that would be:
MEL
joint -e -oj xyz -ch -zso "nameOfJoint";
Python
cmds.joint("nameOfJoint", e = True, oj = "xyz", ch = True, sao = "none")
Also, as someone who likes my joints well oriented, I would advise you against using *secondaryAxisOrientation* none undless your jointchain is perfectly straight, your secondary axis might flip by 180 degrees from joint to joint if you don't specify it.
Hope this helps
