I put a question out to my Ford Yammer network asking what books every Engineer should read (regardless of your major). I received some great suggestions. If you’ve read any of these books please leave a review!
-The Great Gatsby. Nothing to do with engineering, it’s just a good book. :) Or To Kill a Mockingbird (50th anniversary was in the news recently); same reason. The Mythical Man-Month is great. It’s about software development but the advice probably applies well to many disciplines.
-How to win friends and influence people:), the best engineers communicate best.
-To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (by Henry Petroski). This book explains how engineering design (usually using civil or structural engineering examples) evolves. In fact, it shows how designs continue to evolve over long periods of time and across projects and designers to the point of expand »failure. Designers and builders, in pursuit of lower cost, faster development, etc. continuously alter known good designs, but only slightly over the previous version, under assumptions that very small changes won’t introduce much risk. This incremental strategy works for a while, but eventually that last incremental “refinement” pushes the design over the threshold of failure. Example: bridge design evolving from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
-A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander, et. al.
-The ZEUS Book
-Tracey Kidder’s “The Soul of a New Machine” and Don Norman’s “The Design of Everyday Things”. I’d advocate Edward Tufte’s trilogy of books to anyone thinking of visual expanding representation in any way, and in a similar vein Richard Feynman’s ‘Six Easy Pieces’ audio tapes are a master class for those desiring to inspire or teach others (as well as for those who want to learn about the physical world around us).
-Ingenious Mechanisms for Designers and Inventors (4-Volume Set)
-Quality, Productivity and Competitive Position by W. Edwards Demming. Simple, experiential and thus very readable. Demming was a physicist turned statistician, who enabled U.S. to win WWII by improving quality of our military goods. After the war, U.S. was not interested in his lessons, but Japan invited him there, and he taught Japan quality.
-Another great reference book is the Bosch Automotive Handbook.
