My wife: Whatcha reading?

Me: An old textbook on astrodynamics.

My wife: … Why?

Me: There’s a table I was looking up, and I remembered how good a book it was and just started reading it again.

My wife: Babe, you’re weird. (This is not an unusual way for our conversations to end)

Honestly, my wife is right, I am weird; I was reading a text book! Not glancing through it, not searching for some data, but actually reading it! The funny thing is, I’m not alone. Back in college we would gush over a well written aerodynamics text, or ask each other which chapter we had gotten to of a mechanics of materials book, while discussing our favorite parts.

In my defense, it’s hard to come across good textbooks. 90% of the information is the same from book to book, but typically it’s conveyed in a fairly dry, inaccessible format. When a well written book comes along, we tend to latch on to it, regardless of the topic.

Other times it’s the exact opposite. The author, seemingly understanding and sympathetic to his audience (re: students), skips actually writing as much as possible and relies on equations, graphs, charts, and tables to make their point. These books don’t get read as much, but tend to earn a prime spot on our desks and book shelves. (Ed note: Or on Knovel!)

Here are 3 of my favorite texts:

Fundamentals of Astrodynamics:
This book was written for the Air Force Academy before I was born. Amazingly despite its age it’s still very relevant! Covering orbital elements, two-body equations, interplanetary flight and orbital analysis, this book is the bench mark to which other books in the area are compared.
Prefacing each chapter is a bit of history on the topic and the authors pay great detail to explain how equations are developed. No other text in my opinion will teach you more about rocket science faster than this book.
ISBN 0-486-60061-0

Space Propulsion Analysis and Design:
People who know simply call this book SPAD. (ie, “Did you check SPAD?” or “Do you know SPAD?”)  This book falls squarely into the second category. The authors focused less on chit-chatting with the reader and packed the book full of tables and graphs. From stand heats of formation tables for combustion equations, to hybrid rocket engine diagrams, to rocket sizing estimation charts, this book is one of the ultimate references in the space industry. If you’re hiring a rocket scientist and they haven’t heard of SPAD… find someone else.
ISBN 0-07-031320-02

Fundamentals of Aerodynamics:
Several years ago I actually met the author, John Anderson, at an AIAA conference on hypersonics. I’ll admit I made a fool of myself by practically gushing to him how much I enjoyed the book. It’s a good thing my copy was several states away or I might have tried to get him to autograph it.

Anderson takes the ugly confusing topic of deriving aerodynamic equations from an elementary computational-fluid-dynamics perspective and somehow manages to make it understandable. This in itself would make it a great book, but the author expands on this and makes this book an excellent, readable textbook all while nailing down basic, fundamental concepts. “Look at Anderson” is not an uncommon term in the aerospace community.
ISBN: 0-07-33981-01

Enough about my favorites, what do you guys think? What are your favorite text books?  I know you have at least one… Go ahead, let your nerd out.