The taste of bear can vary a lot, for example a bear that fed off of a garbage dump will usually taste bad even to people that like bear meat. While a bear that has been eating grass, berries and such will taste better.
Most people I know cook bear the same way that they would cook the similar cut of meat from a pig.
The secret with any wild game is to cool the animal quickly, in my experience most "gamey" tasting meat was caused by the hunter not field dressing and cooling the meat properly.
A normal sized black bear is usually not a particularly hard animal to kill and any deer type caliber will work on them
When I hunted black bear I usually used the same 180 grain 308 win bullet that I used for deer