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Besides the machinery's handbook what books do u guys keep on the shelf. I'm planning on buying a macro b programming book but was wondering what would be some other good ones to be looking at.

I keep, and often use, an old edition of Mark's Handbook. My 1930s edition finally died about two years ago, so I upgraded to the 1940s. The old books have index tabs and useful articles, not always up to date but very practical.

CNC Programming Handbook is a good one.

For lathe programming I like my workbook from Hardinge training.. I keep ME Pro open a lot too.

It depends to some extent what your focus is. Since I retired from teaching mine is mostly one-off experimental and development stuff so I lean heavily towards old books of workshop practice and techniques because there is a huge amount of valuable experience I can draw on. Reference books too, Machinery's, Kempe's and others. Basically, any I can lay my hands on.

Not surprisingly, my collection is mostly UK published. Most used are Chapman's Workshop Technology (both metric and imperial editions depending what I'm doing), Drills Taps and Dies by the English Tubal Cain, and AutoCAD for Dummies.

The greatest value in all these books is knowing what's in them, so I always have a couple in convenient places for browsing. Libraries have been described as 'thought in cold storage' so I strongly recommend building your own engineering library.

George

It mostly depends on the line of work you concentrate on. I do a lot of design work in cad, but I also do machining and some custom programming for machining and cad applications.
I keep the machinery's handbook within reach for general info, but for cnc reference I use CNC Programming Handbook and CNC Control Setup. I also find myself referring to The Tool Steel Guide as a material properties reference. There are also a number of websites I refer to for material properties for plastics and various other materials.

btm

Chapman's Workshop Technology and CNC Programming Handbook are pretty decent books in my opinion.

wicky293 said:

Besides the machinery's handbook what books do u guys keep on the shelf. I'm planning on buying a macro b programming book but was wondering what would be some other good ones to be looking at.

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take cnc machine manuals even if over 2000 pages and create a digital copy even if you have to scan every page. then in Adobe Acrobat software i create bookmarks of keywords. thus a Search of a keyword will get you to a particular page in a second. like a books index but since you create your own so to speak on the computer you can add bookmarks or create your own index.
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thus i can on a computer find usually stuff faster than any book, read on the computer or print out a page if needed. one usb flash drive can easily have hundreds of books on it and easily over a million pages. the same books could easily weigh over a 200 lbs.
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books can be on a ereader or tablet though usually a computer with a bigger screen can make for easier reading. some college kids scan books and swap digital copies so one person is not scanning all the books. of course if they sell digital copies buy them. not worth the labor of scanning usually easier to just buy digital version

btm said:

It mostly depends on the line of work you concentrate on. I do a lot of design work in cad, but I also do machining and some custom programming for machining and cad applications.
I keep the machinery's handbook within reach for general info, but for cnc reference I use CNC Programming Handbook and CNC Control Setup. I also find myself referring to The Tool Steel Guide as a material properties reference. There are also a number of websites I refer to for material properties for plastics and various other materials.

btm

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Wish I could be more specific as to which areas but honestly pretty much anything that envolves mechanical engineering, trig any type of machining really. Right now what I do is production style machining. At a company that builds asphalt paving equipment. I run a horizontal with a Fanuc f31-IA control. And design and build my own fixtures. I've recently started dabbling in macro programming.

I've got the fanc manuals on pdf which I find my self referring to a lot. And the trig section in the machinerys hand book

Peter Smid has some really nice programming books whether your a novice are an experienced programmer (which I'm not) should be a nice collection.