The 10 Best Engineering Textbooks

In Thermodynamics: An Engineering Approach, the authors attempt to first explain crucial concepts, then develop in readers the ability to confidently put these to use. Although the principles can be tricky, the writing is clear, detailed, and accessible.

The cleverly titled "To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design" is both a fascinating read and an educational one, as it will help students understand how to learn from defeat and malfunction, whether their own or that of someone else.

Covering sustainability and balance between materials and energy, Introduction to Environmental Engineering is highly accessible to students thanks to more than 720 end-of-chapter problems and plenty of thought-provoking questions.

You can get your hands dirty with Practical Electronics for Inventors, which covers a huge range of topics for everyone from casual hobbyists to serious engineers. These include touchscreens, microcontrollers, DC motors, microphones, solar cells, and much, much more.

If you are bashing your head against a wall while trying to get a grip on all of the equations and principles you’re expected to know, then you may need some help from Schaum’s Outline of Advanced Mathematics. It’ll get you test-ready in no time -- ish.

Engineering Economy is an educational resource and reference volume that presents engineers of all specialties with crucial info about costs, risk analysis, budgeting, and the value of time and money. This edition has been updated to reflect current issues in the field.

Even those with only a casual interest in the field might enjoy The Design of Everyday Things, which takes a look at product design and the pitfalls it runs into, such as relationships between control and function that make no meaningful sense.

You’ll gain a productive understanding of metals, ceramics, polymers, and composites with Materials Science and Engineering: An Introduction, along with a command of structural relationships. Best of all, it’s got plenty of full-color photos to make learning easier.

Written by an experienced professor, Mechanics: Statics & Dynamics was created to help readers build both practical abilities and conceptual knowledge in this area. The problems it contains offer varying levels of difficulty and are drawn from real-world situations.

In this fifth edition of Fundamentals: An Introduction, author Saeed Moaveni starts at the very beginning with what it is that engineers do, then travels over a variety of topics, from physical concepts to mathematics, in order to provide a foundational look at this field.