I work as an engineer in manufacturing, coincidentally to this article I work at an integrated Steelworks. I know our plant has a visitor's center and there is

I work as an engineer in manufacturing, coincidentally to this article I work at an integrated Steelworks. I know our plant has a visitor's center and there is a company that takes tour groups through the site on certain days (mostly school children). I have heard some other sites such as mines and power stations also do tours. Depending on where you live there may be a site nearby that you could visit, nothing like experiencing it first hand. For books I'd recommend the "Chemical Engineers' Handbook" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry's_Chemical_Engineers'_Handbook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry's_Chemical_Engineers'_Ha... That's a pretty good general textbook that should give you a lot of fundamentals. We keep a copy in our office and it's well thumbed through. Anything else I could recommend would be much less general more specialized topic (i.e thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, solid mechanics etc). Sorry I can't really offer more than that Manufacturing is a hugely broad discipline. To start with maybe consider if you are more interested in primary processing (mining, refining, smelting etc) or secondary processing (turning raw materials into products).