Free Engineering Textbooks: A Subject-by-Subject Guide
Engineering textbooks are some of the most expensive on any university book list, and new editions are released frequently enough that used copies don't stay cheap for long. The core material changes slowly, though, which means free alternatives stay usable for years.
Mechanical engineering
MIT OpenCourseWare's mechanical engineering department has released full course material — lecture notes, problem sets, and often full video lectures — for statics, dynamics, thermodynamics, and materials science.
Electrical engineering
Circuits and Electronics (MIT 6.002x course material)
by MIT Department of EECS
Complete free course material covering circuit analysis fundamentals, the same core content as most introductory circuits textbooks.
Civil engineering
Structural analysis and statics fundamentals are well covered by MIT and other OpenCourseWare offerings — search by specific topic (structural analysis, soil mechanics, fluid mechanics) rather than a general "civil engineering textbook" search, since the material is usually organized by course, not as a single omnibus text.
Chemical engineering
- •Search "chemical engineering thermodynamics open textbook" for free alternatives covering the same material as standard commercial texts.
- •Process design and unit operations fundamentals are covered in several openly licensed university course packets, worth searching by specific topic.
Engineering fundamentals (statics, thermodynamics, circuit theory) change far less between editions than the marketing suggests — a free text from a few years ago is almost always still fully usable for coursework.
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