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eric -- While I agree that Machinery's Handbook is an essential book for serious mechanical engineers and machinists, I don't think it qualifies as a good general-purpose metalworking book. So I'll make a couple different suggestions: If you want to cover the basics of machining, precision measurement, metal casting, welding, heat treating, and so forth the book "General Metals" published by Goodhart-Wilcox is hard to beat. It is intended as a textbook for high-school general metalshop classes and I still keep my copy handy 30+ years after I graduated. I've seen General Metals at some of the chain bookstores (Walden, B. Dalton, and the like). A couple of other textbooks that may fill your needs are "Machine Tool Operation" and "Shop Theory" . . . I believe that Axelrod and Burghardt wrote both of these books but I'm not sure if either of them is still being published. If you want to get deeper into machining, "Machine Shop Practice" by Karl Moltrecht is an outstanding 2-volume set. I've never seen Machine Shop Practice at those bookstores, but it is readily available from the large industrial suppliers like MSC, Travers Tool, Rutland/Airgas, Penn Tool, and others. Expect to pay about $40 for the set. Of course, if you live near to a college or fairly large city you should check the libraries to see which of the standard textbooks fits your needs best. Different people learn things in different ways, and the author that "speaks to" one type of learner may well end up "talking Greek" to a different type of learner. The book that to me is the best in the world may not reach you at all. John
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