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Originally Posted by Adam Y.
On the other hand, my one college professor told me that you are allowed to bring as many books as you can when you are taking your P.E license exam.
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However, you can only go through the door once, so you have to bring them all in one trip. When I took the PE many people brought 5 or 6 milk crates loaded with reference books and set up their own little library.
I kept it down to a single backback. I think it was 6 books. Most important was my PE reference manual, by Lindberg. It has a touch of everything and lots of data and tables on things like pipe sizes. I also brough one thermo book, one statics book, a structures book that also had good materials data (mostly for the data), and a calculus book (Thomas 4th ed). I had a book I liked better as a text book for calculus, but in Thomas I could "remember the sides of the pages" for things I felt I was likely to need. I was not nearly as familiar with the other book. Oh and I almost forgot, Mechancal Design by Shigley, an absolute classic. All sorts of little problems, like stress on a hook, neatly solved.
If I could only keep one of my reference books it would be Lindberg, it is especially good at bringing back all the stuff you used to know. In fact during the first three weeks of build, when we are doing our design work, Lindberg is rarely far from my side, in spite of weighing something like 10 lbs.
If you have too many references, you spend too much time looking for things. Knowing where to find key items quickly is much better.
But Dave is right too, there are certain things you should just know. Like stress=Mc/I or F=ma