Before I start, I would like to apologize for using の twice as a particle in my title. It'd be nice if somebody mentioned a way to umm, compress it or just take one of those out, lol.
At any case, so today I got a Japanese textbook in a bookstore. It was slightly pricy, and not some fancy textbook like げんき, or even a textbook in a technical sense (It doesn't actually have a path of instruction); it's called Essential Japanese Grammar, by Tuttle, if you'd like to look it up. I like it because it's more of a nice reference tool for grammar.
At any case, so I took a read over it, and it says in one of the pages at the front side of the book that apparently は emphasizes the subject more than が (I can't type the original quote as that would violate the copyright of the book, and I just spent a few minutes trying to find it but I can't). So I got confused since I thought that は is a general subject marker whereas が emphasizes it.
For example, when I read Japanese text, I would read it in a way that, in the case of a dog being in a particular spot...
「犬はあそこにいる」would mean "A dog is there", whereas 「犬があそこにいる」would mean "The dog is there" or "A DOG is there", emphasizing the fact that the subject is a dog. This book seems to state the reverse.
So, I'm confused now. How does は and が actually work?