Sunday, August 02, 2009

Books Engineers should read

Bob Colwell the 2005 recipient of the IEEE Computer Society/ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award, was Intel’s chief IA32 architect through the Pentium II, III, and 4 microprocessors has listed a set of books that engineers should read. Some of these books are truly insightful and I wonder why don't we have some of these real world learning incorporated in engineering education. Here's the list for engineers who want to sharpen their thinking and enhance their craft.
1. To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (St. Martin’s Press,
1982) - Henry Petroski
2. The Civilized Engineer(St. Martin’s Press, 1987) - Samuel Florman
3. The Control of Nature (Noonday Press, 1989) - John McPhee
4. Robert Pool, Beyond Engineering: How Society Shapes Technology, Oxford University Press, 1997
5. James L. Adams, Flying Buttresses, Entropy, and O-Rings: The World of an Engineer, Harvard Press, 1991
6. Stephen H. Unger, Controlling Technology, Wiley Interscience, 1994
7. Henry Petroski, Design Paradigms: Case Studies of Error and Judgment in Engineering, Cambridge University Press, 1994
8. Normal Accidents (Princeton University Press, 1984, 1999), Charles Perrow
9. James Chiles, Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology (HarperCollins
2001)
10. Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision, University of Chicago Press, 1996 : A must read to understand the misunderstanding between engineers and managers which led to the Challenger disaster
11. Scott D. Sagan, The Limits of Safety, Princeton University Press, 1993
12. Aaron Wildavsky, Searching for Safety, Transaction Publishers, 1991
13. Matthys Levy and Mario Salvadori, Why Buildings Fall Down, Norton & Co., 1992
14. Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, Knopf, 1996
15. Richard Schwing and Walter Albers, Societal Risk Assessment: How Safe Is Safe Enough?, Plenum Press, 1980; and
16. Stephen Potter, On the Right Lines? The Limits of Technological Innovation, St. Martin’s Press, 1987.
17. M. Hirsh Goldberg’s The Blunder Book (Quill, 1984)
18. Thomas Friedman in The Lexus and the Olive Tree (Anchor Books, 2000)
19. Tom Kelley’s The Art of Innovation (Currency Doubleday, 2001)
20. Donald Norman, The Invisible Computer, MIT Press, 1998;
21. Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month, Addison- Wesley, 1979
22. Andy Grove, Only The Paranoid Survive, Currency, 1996
23. Jerry Weissman, Presenting to Win, Prentice Hall, 2003
24. Clayton Christenson’s The Innovator’s Dilemma (HarperCollins, 1997)
25. Eric J. Chaisson’s The Hubble Wars (HarperCollins, 1994)
26. Steve Sqyres's Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet (Hyperion, 2005)
27. Gene Kranz's Failure Is Not an Option (Simon and Schuster, 2000)
28. Richard Feynman’s What Do You Care What Other People Think? (Norton, 1988) or The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (Perseus, 1999)
29. Donald Knuth’s book titled Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About (Stanford Univ. Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2001)
30. On Intelligence (Times Books, 2004), Jeff Hawkins and finally
31. Bob Colwell's book The Pentium Chronicles: The People, Passion, and Politics Behind Intel’s Landmark Chips (Wiley, 2005)

If you think there are others that you would recommend, please add it to this list.