Engineers & Textbooks..

[ChrisH]

I have about half of my books at home and the rest at work. Last week I brought two books (including my PE reference guide) from home to work because I need them for something I am working on. Those two particular books are also useful for robotics stuff so they travel more than most.

I find text books are in many ways more useful than the Internet. For one thing the references are static. When I write a report and cite an "allowable" value, if it is questioned I can turn right to the page. The internet is fluid and information sources are of differing reliability. Do you really want to have to say in court that you used a certain value you obtained from the internet to design something that broke and caused a liability issue? It is much better to be able to open a book and point to the number. (You do remember to cite your references, right?) "Doing it by the book" is not a perfect answer to liability issues, but it sure improves your credibility, especially when you can point out that thousands of engineers have been trained using the same book.

Another advantage is I tend to "see" the item I'm looking for in a book. I might not be able to tell you the page number, but I will be able to tell you the equation is in the bottom right hand corner of the right page and there is a fancy graph on the left side. That and a quick perusal of the table of contents to find the relevant chapter to get a page range and I can usually find what I'm looking for in a few minutes. This all assumes you actually know what is in the books.

I do the same thing with the internet, but due to it's fluidity the references tend to disappear on me, or the page gets reformated. Remembering where to find something on a webpage that no longer exists is pretty useless. Yes I know there are ways to dig through archives, but I usually don't remember enough about the page I'm remembering to track it down.

I must admit that what I use most in textbooks is the tables and graphs, though occasionally I'll have to look up a formula or a computation method. Over the years I have used textbooks covering Static, Dynamics, Fluids, Machine Design, Thermo, and Heat Transfer and of course the PE Reference guide has most of these in it in a shortened form.

It only takes about 3 or 4 fileboxes to hold all my textbooks, a mere drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the library. I have thought about tossing the notebooks with all my homework in them. Those are several more boxes and I have trouble getting anything useful out of them. But about every other year or so I do find somehing useful and I'm glad I haven't yet.