Machinery handbook rocks, but it is far from perfect. It's great for machining, it doesn't cover all of mechanical engineering. I've leaned hard on Roarks formula handbook through my career. A materials reference book goes a long way too. More recently referring frequently to degarmos manufacturing book.

I've used a cheap-ish Windows laptop for almost all of my research and design. CAD can suffer as assemblies get large, I turn fancy rendering off as it is mechanical engineering, not making prettying renders. FEA can eat resources fast. I've pushed to a beefier desktop as required. I've done some CAD on a tablet, but I hate the form factor for it.

I went to a top tier school for MechE and Materials, and would recommend two intro books: Engineering Mechanics Statics by Meriam and Kriage and Shigley's Mechanical engineering Design in that order . If you fully understand the contents of these book, it probably puts you in the top 10% of mechanical engineering graduates.

For a broader education, you can read Fundamentals of Heat and Mass transfer by Incropera, DeWitt, Bergmann & Lavine as well as Fundamentals of Fluid Mechanics by Munson, Young & Okiishi.

Understanding these two books will probably as well will probably put you in the top 1% of grads.

If you have a strong background in mathematics, these mostly deal with applications of linear algebra and differentials, so the value is understanding the applications.

From there, you can branch out. If applicable, Ogata's Modern Control Engineering and Tongu's Principles of vibration

Most undergraduates dont really understand these due to the heavy application of Laplace and Fourier transforms, but are relevant if you want to build complex machines.

It is basically the equivalent of a picture book, with 200 pages of free body diagrams, which may be helpful to someone if they aren't used to thinking in terms of beams, forces, and moments.

The entire books' contents is probably covered in pages of Shigley's, and perhaps for some people that is enough..

That said, it is definitely the weakest of the suggestions. The rest are serious books that a professional might refer back to. On the other hand you should really never need to refer back to a statics text, and it could be switched out for any number of options.

For self-learning, I don't know if anyone would work through the problems in a statics textbook. Shigley looks good. Thanks for that recommendation.

For heat transfer, I eventually wound up on the bibliography from Hot Air Rises and Heat Sinks by Tony Kordyban, which is more focused on cooling electronics. I have Holman's Heat Transfer on my shelf as a result and I can recommend it for self-learning. One big advantage to Holman: he shows how to set up common thermal problems in Excel in an appendix. I would consider recommending a good continuum mechanics book in the place of a fluid mechanics book - I liked Yuan-Cheng Fung's First Course in Continuum Mechanics but I haven't looked at it or anything else in its domain for a while.

Ogata is a good controls text. I don't know if any of them are good for self-learning. I tried and had to take a class to wrap my head around feedback control. Tongue looks interesting. Thanks for the recommendation.

There's an MIT course on OpenCourseware that's called (roughly) "How to make (almost) anything" and also "FUNdamentals of Machine Design." (or something like that!) I think they're by Richard (?) Slocum. I started a long time ago and cherry picked the parts I cared about. Slocum's writing is very entertaining and he's easy to follow along with.

As you can tell, my memory isn't that great :-)