Other Books
Here is a list of other books worth reading and owning. This list will be updated as suggestions are made. If there's a book you think your classmates should know about, let us know.

Theatrical Design and Production One of the required books in this course, TD&P briefly touches on numerous subjects relevant to our craft.
 
The Backstage Handbook This book is the technician's Bible. It is a reference containing tables on numerous subjects, drawings of tools and hardware, electrical formulas, and nearly anything else you can think of.
 
Technical Theatre for Nontechnical People If you can get past the typos, technical errors, bad examples, and all its other problems, you might like this book. Some people like it because it is an 'easy to understand' reference. We think it makes subjects easy by treating them unfully or incorrectly. Not recomended, unless you're realllllly new to this.
 
Structural Design for the Stage Engineering for the theatre. This book will teach you to calculate spans, structural trussing, and all kinds of other hard-to-calculate things. It's tough reading, but it's an essential for people who want to do the sort of "engineered" theater that is becoming more and more common.
 
Control Systems for Live Entertainment The authorative book for those of you interested in integration between light, sound, video, and set. This book gets into the details of DMX, MIDI, MIDI Show Control, SMTP timecode, and other methods used to connect our systems together. This type of stuff is essential if you're going to get involved in concert, industrial, or even highly-technical theatrical productions.
 
Pocket Ref Similar to the backstage handbook, only not specific to our industry. The Pocket Ref contains alllll kinds of information, from airline phone numbers to load ratings of various sizes of chain. It's just a good general reference book for all kinds of technical trades. And it's tiny.
 
Practical Guide to Stage Lighting Randy Ward calls this the only book worth buying on lighting design. It takes a very logical and usefull approach to the technical side of lighting design: scheduling, paper work, managing people. There's also plenty of important artistic info in here.
 
Stage Rigging Handbook Knots, trim chains, turnbuckles, single purchase, double purchase, etc. Everything rigging is in this book. If you want to hang stuff safely, you could stand to have this book.
 
When you're browsing around Amazon and the bookstores, consider looking at some subjects besides Theatre. Our industry (Technical Theatre) has arisen from adapting other technologies to our craft. Have a look at:
Robotics and Electronics: In Theatre, we're constantly adapting electronics gizmos and trying to make motors spin under control of our lighting computers. The field of hobby robotics is probably the only other (aside from industrial automation) that is all about kludging things together in reliable but affordable ways.
Carpentry: Duh. Framing, finish carpentry, cabinet making, and every other variety of woodworking comes into play in Theatre. Besides: carpenters make good money.
Faux Painting: We do less and less of this as materialities become more important, but it's still a good skill to have. There are WAY more books in faux painting for the home than there are on faux painting for the stage.
Computers: AutoCAD, Photoshop, Protools, Vectorworks, Word, Access, Excel, WYSIWYG, HTML... everything computer is used in Theatre.
 
This is just a start. The more theatre you do, the more you realize there's only one simple thing you really need to know: Everything.