Best Woodworking Books (For Beginners & Pros!)
1. The Complete Book of Woodworking
Step-by-Step Guide to Essential Woodworking Skills, Techniques and Tips. More Than 40 Projects with Detailed, Easy-to-Follow Plans and Over 200 Photos.
You’ll learn how to make a range of high-quality indoor and outdoor furnishings.
This book also provides worthwhile advice regarding how to run a woodworking shop, and numerous useful safety techniques are addressed as well.
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2. The Essential Woodworker
Another classic, “The Essential Woodworker” deals with the skills and techniques that are essential for all woodworkers.
Robert Wearing uses the example of a dining table to intricately show all that’s needed to make this piece of furniture.
Specifically, he explains how essential tools are used, which sawing techniques are worthwhile, and how planning should be handled.
He was a prominent woodworker throughout the latter half of the 20th century, and reading this book you sense right away that he’s speaking as a master woodworker.
3. The Woodbook: The Complete Plates
The woods are arranged in alphabetical order, and each wood has a radial, horizontal, and tangential cut so the reader can see and feel the wood in order to gain a deeper understanding of it.These books also explain where different woods come from, and the physical characteristics of each wood are discussed at length so the reader knows exactly which woods have properties that make them ideal for woodworking.
4. Bill Hylton’s Power-Tool Joinery
This is a must-read if you want to learn the art that is making joinery. This book also discusses how jigs and fixtures can be used to assist in the cutting of joints.
And you’ll only need a few basic power tools to create the joints discussed here. Specifically, this book discusses:Edge joints, Splined joints, Sliding dovetail joints, Lap and half-lap joints, Rabbet joints, Miter joints, Mortise-and-tenon joints, Biscuit joints, Dado joints, Dovetail joints
5. Good Clean Fun: Misadventures in Sawdust at Offerman Woodshop
In this book, Offerman covers a range of popular woodworking projects while discussing his own woodworking journey, and even experts have said this book can help a woodworker rediscover the fun in woodworking. This book is especially useful for young woodworkers who are just starting out,
6. The Complete Manual Of Woodworking: A Detailed Guide To Design, Techniques, And Tools
This book covers the ins and outs of working with both hardwoods in softwoods, and these sections are particularly useful to the novice woodworker. It is full of helpful descriptions, infographics and high-quality pictures. Plus the writing is straightforward and easy to understand.
7. Working Wood 1 & 2: The Artisan Course With Paul Sellers
There are over 800 color photos, plenty of illustrations, and many diagrams in this book, and Sellers describes things in a step-by-step manner that’s easy to read and comprehend. He also goes over how to use a wide range of hand tools, and this information is especially helpful to young woodworkers who are just starting out.
8. Great Book Of Woodworking Tips
This book is a collection of useful woodworking tips and tricks. Specifically, you’ll find information on:
- How to rout effectively
- How to fit edge joints
- How to sharpen blades and bits
- How to work with 4×8 sheets
- How to make drawer slides
- How to plane to thickness
- How to glue and clamp awkward miters
- How to flatten warped wood
9. Understanding Wood Finishing
How to Select and Apply the Right Finish Practical & Comprehensive; 350 Photos, 40 Reference Tables & Troubleshooting Guides.As the title implies, this book covers the ins and outs of using wood finishing.It puts forward plenty of up-to-date information, over 300 useful photos, detailed instructions and explanations, and bedrock information that you should know if you like to apply finish to your wood projects.
10. The Workbench Design Book
This book mainly focuses on how to set up a modern workbench that’ll allow you to execute a range of woodworking tasks. It also covers some woodworking fundamentals, and it’s particularly useful for somebody who’s going to be working in a home wood shop.
11. Woodworker's Shop Journal
- Log & organize your projects with room for sketches, patterns, and materials lists
- Record essential information for building it again, from wood types to tools, and noting anything you learned from mistakes
- Checklists for your tools let you track what you already have and what you still need to get
- Quick-reference tables for grain, Rockwell hardness, grit, formulas, and more
- Numbered pages, handsome foil-stamped hardcover, and blank table of contents for you to fill in as your shop journal grows