Engineers & Textbooks..

[JesseK]

I've kept my books. Then again I also annotated them while I was in college taking the classes so I could go back years later and re-proof the equations if I needed to. I'd rather have them than the internet any day since finding credible and clear information on the internet is ... not so easy sometimes.

[AdamHeard]

Thanks for the good advice; I'm heading off to college in a few weeks and I'll be sure to keep my books now.

[dtengineering]

Originally Posted by ManicMechanic

I refer to some of my 20-year-old engineering textbooks (mainly Control Theory, but also Signal Processing) fairly regularly. I teach math at a junior college ....

I, too, hang on to old textbooks for educational purposes. After studying (to use the term rather loosely) engineering for several years I moved into teaching tech studies at the high school level. Pulling out the old PDE texts every now and then gives my students going into Engineering an idea of what they have to look forward to!

I also find that the old texts are sometimes a quicker reference than the web if they are handy... because I know where to look in them.

They also serve as excellent weights for holding things in place and give my bookshelf a distinguished look.

Jason

[SteveJanesch]

Hang on to as many as you can for as long as you can - you don't know now what you'll be working on in five years. I go back to my comm systems, control theory and circuit theory books regularly (I'm a radio integrated circuit designer by trade). I haven't completely stopped taking classes or buying new texts, so my collection is still growing after 20 years in the field. What I do find is that I refer to the newer books more often than most older ones, because they're the most relevant to what I'm currently working on.

On the other hand, it's not the worst thing in the world if you do jettison a book and find you need it later. Other engineers will have their books in their offices, so you can usually borrow what you need, or go out and buy an updated edition of what you had or something by another author for yourself.

Maybe the best thing is to plan on keeping everything for your first four or five years out of school, then start weeding out the ones you're least likely to need (this is almost exclusively prompted by an office or company move, btw). Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to clear some space on a bookshelf...anybody want a 23 year old (and way, way obsolete) microwave devices text?

Steve Janesch