Most of these references are pulled from the Bibliography of The Dog Barks When the Phone Rings: An Engineer's Guide to Solving Problems.

For convenience, I have added links to Amazon's listing of most books, where available.  Typically, you can use this resource to browse some of the book content.  Purchasing decisions are up to you.

Great Books for any technical person or their managers

• The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande (Metropolitan, 2010.) If you only can afford to buy one book, get The Checklist Manifesto, listed first here. Read it and embrace it. You will never regret it.

• The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software by Frederick P. Brooks (Addison-Wesley Professional, 1995)

• The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerald M. Weinberg (Dorset House, 1998)

Great Books for Electrical or Electro-Mechanical Designers

• Troubleshooting Analog Circuits by Robert A. Pease (Butterworth-Heinemann, 1991)

• Hot Air Rises and Heat Sinks: Everything You Know about Cooling Electronics Is Wrong by Tony Kordyban (ASME Press, 1998)

• More Hot Air by Tony Kordyban (ASME Press, 2005)

• High-Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic by Howard Johnson and Martin Graham (Prentice Hall, 1993)

Here is one additional reference that is worth a look. Some folks might find the topic too dry or too peripheral to design, but this book earned a spot on my bookshelf:

• Engineering Documentation Control Handbook, Fourth Edition: Configuration Management and Product Lifecycle Management by Frank B. Watts (William Andrew, 2011)

Engineering Failure
If you really want to understand good design, you have study failures, not successes.  I have encountered some really good books on this subject. Another source of similar information is to read the NASA reports on their shuttle accidents.

• To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design by Henry Petroski (Vintage, 1992)

• Set Phasers on Stun: And Other True Tales of Design, Technology, and Human Error by Steven Casey (Aegean Publishing Co., 1998)

• Air Disasters by Stanley Stewart (Ian Allan, 1986)

Professional Troubleshooting

There are some other folks out there who teach formal problem-solving for engineers and managers. The gold-standard for larger organizations must be Kepner-Tregoe. I have never attended training by Kepner-Tregoe, but I have read various works published by their organization.

• The Rational Manager: A Systematic Approach to Problem Solving and Decision Making by Charles Higgins Kepner and Benjamin B. Tregoe (McGraw-Hill, 1965)

You can also find out more about their training and services at: http://www.kepner-tregoe.com

During my research, I encountered the book listed below by David Jonassen, who dives deeply into the question of how one should teach problem-solving to engineers. He has published extensively on this topic.

• Learning to Solve Problems: An Instructional Design Guide by David H. Jonassen (Pfeiffer, 2004)

After I finished writing the first draft of The Dog Barks When the Phone Rings: An Engineer's Guide to Solving Problems, my friend and former manager, Dr. Lauren Christopher told me that she was teaching a class from a book that seemed similar to a brief description she had read of my book.  I purchased a copy of the book she referenced only to find that David Agans’ book Debugging runs deeply parallel to the intent, style, and structure of what I have written.

I was both thrilled and stunned. I was thrilled because it meant that I was probably describing something reasonable. Stunned, because I had never seen anyone else commit such familiar ideas into writing. I must therefore acknowledge that I am not the first to offer such notions. Where Agans tells “war stories,” I mostly tell “fairy tales.” Where I say, “If I could see it, I could fix it,” Agans tells readers to stop thinking and start looking.

I recommend that you treat Agans’ book and An Engineer's Guide to Solving Problems as bookends on your debugging shelf. These books share some similar concepts, presented differently by different authors. I confess to really liking Agans’ book. A lot.

• Debugging: The 9 Indispensable Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems by David J. Agans (AMACOM, 2006)