Top Engineering books curated by experts

While our cities are full of incredible engineering feats, most of us live with little idea of what goes into creating the built environment, let alone how a new building goes up, what it is constructed upon, or how it remains standing. In Built, star structural engineer Roma Agrawal explains ho…

The most effective engineers — the ones who have risen to become distinguished engineers and leaders at their companies — can produce 10 times the impact of other engineers, but they're not working 10 times the hours. They've internalized a mindset that took me years of trial and error to figure…

This fully revised and updated edition of the 1944 classic serves as a crucial compilation of 'house rules' or a professional code. This new edition keeps the style of the original and much of its content. Changes reflect shifted societal values, changed employment laws and evolved corporate str…

“Though ours is an age of high technology, the essence of what engineering is and what engineers do is not common knowledge. Even the most elementary of principles upon which great bridges, jumbo jets, or super computers are built are alien concepts to many. This is so in part because engineerin…

This fully revised and updated edition of the 1944 classic serves as a crucial compilation of 'house rules' or a professional code. This new edition keeps the style of the original and much of its content. Changes reflect shifted societal values, changed employment laws and evolved corporate str…

Capturing a wealth of experience about the design of object-oriented software, four top-notch designers present a catalog of simple and succinct solutions to commonly occurring design problems. Previously undocumented, these 23 patterns allow designers to create more flexible, elegant, and ultim…

Everything has structure. Structure is the difference between a random pile of components and a fully functional object. Through structure the parts connect to make the whole. Natural structures vary from the very smallest part of an atom to the entire cosmology of the universe. Man-made structu…

What inspires and spurs on a great idea? Can we train ourselves to think in a way that will enable world-changing understandings and insights to emerge? Richard Hamming said we can. He first inspired a generation of engineers, scientists, and researchers in 1986 with “You and Your Research,” an …

How did a simple design error cause one of the great disasters of the 1980s - the collapse of the walkways at the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel? What made the graceful and innovative Tacoma Narrows Bridge twist apart in a mild wind in 1940? How did an oversized waterlily inspire the magnificen…

The stories that make up Why Buildings Fall Down are in the end very human ones, tales of the interaction of people and nature, of architects, engineers, builders, materials, and natural forces all coming together in sometimes dramatic (and always instructive) ways. B/W line drawings

The rise of manufacturing could not have happened without an attention to precision. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century England, standards of measurement were established, giving way to the development of machine tools—machines that make machines. Eventually, the appl…

Few books transform a generation and then establish themselves as touchstones for the generations that follow. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is one such book. This modern epic of a man’s search for meaning became an instant bestseller on publication in 1974, acclaimed as one of the m…