<p>What textbooks should a civil engineer hold on to after graduation?</p>
<p>I would assume some from upper division courses such as Fluid/Soil Mechanics, Steel Design, etc. What about Statics/Dynamics? </p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>Whatever books you need to study for EIT and/or PE… duh…</p>
<p>definitely, concrete, steel, wood, and soil. they are very good reference. statics wasn’t too helpful. i found most of the reaction/moment formula from the steel manual without having to do it by hand.</p>
<p>I sold my environmental, transportation, and water resources books for dirt cheap</p>
<p>The rule of thumb is that whatever book you get rid of, you will need five years from now! </p>
<p>Don’t get rid of your calculus book. Once in a blue moon, you might use it!</p>
<p>How about differential equations?</p>
<p>For a practicing structural design engineer, definitley hold on to (in terms of undergrad books):</p>
<p>Reinf/Prestressed/Whatever Concrete
Steel Design
Structural Analysis
Foundation/Soils Engineering
Mechanics of Materials</p>
<p>Wood Design, also, if you took it.</p>
<p>I didn’t get rid of any of my books. You’ve already bought and paid for 'em, and when you get an office, you’ll have a place to keep 'em. I’ve used pretty much all of my books at one point or another, and others have borrowed them from me because they ditched their books and are regretting it now. If you have a place to store your books until you get a cubicle or office, then don’t sell them or give them away-- you might as well keep them.</p>
<p>I have friends from class who will sell books that cost $100+ at the beginning of the semester for ~$10 at the end of the semester. Doesn’t make any sense to me. I just keep everything.</p>
<p>If you didn’t pass the FE exam yet, then keep EVERYTHING.</p>
<p>If you do pass your FE by graduation, then hang on to all your civil engineering specific textbooks and math textbooks as well. I guess you could get rid of your probability, chemistry and physics texts if you really wanted to.</p>
<p>I still use my chemistry text. Someone sent out a company-wide e-mail saying, “Hey, they’re going to be using this stuff called potassium permanganate up against one of our underwater structures to remove a bunch of sludge around the piers… Could that cause any problems with our concrete piers? Could it cause rebar corrosion?” After ten seconds of flipping through my chem reference, I respond by saying, “Potassium permanganate is a strong oxidizer… Maybe we should look at that a little more.”</p>
<p>They asked further questions, I turned to my page on oxidizers, I gave them a refresher course in chemistry via e-mail, and suddenly I’m the company source for all things chemical in nature. Fine by me!</p>
<p>thanks for the feedback!</p>
<p>If you want to be really forward-thinking, put little page flags on any page with tables or whatnot you might find useful. I’m not a CivE, but I know a lot of times I’ll know something I need is in one of my textbooks, and I know the book, but for the life of me I can’t remember the name of the formula/table/concept and I’m forced to page through these 500+ texts. If I had been smart and flagged everything I’d have had a much better jumping off point for my searches.</p>
<p>(Not sure if PE allows flags/notes in your books, someone else would have to comment on that.)</p>
<p>Yes, it does. You can use flags-- every structural engineer I know bookmarks things with post-it flags. I handed out post-it flags to my students when I was a steel design TA and told them it would be in their best interest to start flagging important points in their design codes, and they found that to be really helpful.</p>
<p>IIRC, your notes in your books need to be written in pen, so start making your margin notes in ink if you haven’t done so already.</p>
<p>NCEES currently allows books with post-it notes or flags during PE exams, as long as they stay fastened on the books. You can’t bring in any loose post-it notes or flags.</p>
<p>NCEES doesn’t currently have a policy on pencil vs. ink annotations in reference books, but some state boards apparently do. Some states ban any reference books containing notes in pencil. Notes made with ink or highlighter are OK. </p>
<p>Why? Because they don’t want examinees to copy actual exam questions into their reference books. The only writing implement that you are allowed to have in the exam room is a mechanical pencil. So if your books contain notes in ink, then the notes must have been written before the exam, which is OK. But if your books contain notes in pencil, then they could have been written during the exam, which is a potential problem.</p>
<p>People do attempt to steal exam questions. In California, an examinee was arrested for this a few years ago. He actually modified his graphing calculator to contain a functioning handheld scanner, and tried to scan the whole test with it.</p>