Chapter 1 — Further Reading

Ten pointers, each with a note on why it is worth your time and who it is for. Everything here is a real organization, standard, publication, or widely used textbook. Editions change and websites move, so verify the current version of anything you cite; where I am not certain of a title's exact current edition, I describe the source rather than invent a citation.

Standards, regulators, and primary sources

1. OSHA — 29 CFR Part 1926, Safety and Health Regulations for Construction. The federal construction safety standard in the United States, published in full and free by the U.S. Department of Labor. Even if you never read it cover to cover, read Subpart M (fall protection), Subpart L (scaffolds), and Subpart P (excavations) — those three subparts sit behind an enormous share of construction fatalities, and the "Focus Four" hazard framing (falls, struck-by, caught-in/between, electrocution) organizes how the industry talks about risk. For: everyone, immediately. Note that many states operate their own OSHA-approved plans with requirements at least as strict as the federal ones, and non-U.S. jurisdictions have entirely separate regimes.

2. The International Building Code (IBC), published by the International Code Council. The model code adopted, with amendments, by most U.S. jurisdictions. You do not read it like a book; you learn to find things in it. Start by looking up the occupancy classification and construction type of a building you know. For: anyone who has never seen how a code is organized — which is most people entering the industry.

3. The standard contract document families: AIA, ConsensusDocs, and EJCDC. Each publishes a family of construction agreements and general conditions, along with free descriptions of what each document does and how the families differ in their allocation of risk. Read the descriptions before you read a contract; they will tell you what the drafters were trying to accomplish. For: anyone who will sign, negotiate, or administer a contract — which is anyone who wants to be a project manager.

4. CSI MasterFormat and UniFormat, published by the Construction Specifications Institute. MasterFormat is the division-and-section numbering system that organizes specifications, estimates, and cost codes across the industry; UniFormat organizes by building system rather than by trade, which is what conceptual estimating uses. Learning the division numbers is a week of effort that pays for the rest of your career. For: estimators, project engineers, and anyone about to open a project manual for the first time.

Industry bodies worth knowing

5. The Construction Management Association of America (CMAA). The professional body for construction management as a discipline, publisher of the Certified Construction Manager (CCM) credential and of standards-of-practice guidance describing what a construction manager is responsible for at each project stage. Their framing of the CM's scope is the closest thing the profession has to an agreed job description. For: students deciding whether to pursue the field, and practitioners considering certification.

6. The Associated General Contractors of America (AGC) and the Design-Build Institute of America (DBIA). AGC publishes guidance and education across the whole of general contracting, including subcontractor prequalification and project delivery. DBIA is the authority on design-build specifically, and its best-practices material is the clearest available explanation of why design-build behaves differently from design-bid-build. Read them together: they disagree in useful ways. For: anyone working through Chapter 3.

7. The Lean Construction Institute. The home of the Last Planner System and of the "make work ready" idea that appears in this chapter as the constraint log. If you have ever watched a crew stand around waiting for something that should have been arranged three weeks earlier, this body of work explains why it happens and what to do. For: superintendents, project engineers, and anyone frustrated by the gap between the schedule and reality.

Data you can actually check

8. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — construction employment, wage, and fatality data; and the U.S. Census Bureau's construction spending series. These are the sources behind almost every statistic you will hear quoted about the industry, usually two or three retellings removed. Go to the source once and you will learn to be skeptical of the retellings — including the ones in textbooks. For: anyone who wants to know how big the industry actually is, what it pays, and how dangerous it actually is, in their own region and in the current year.

9. Engineering News-Record (ENR). The industry's trade press since the nineteenth century: project reporting, cost indices, contractor rankings, and the ongoing record of what is being built and what is going wrong. Reading it weekly is the cheapest way to develop a sense of the market you are working in. For: everyone in the industry; especially useful for students who have not yet seen how the business behaves across a cycle.

Textbooks worth owning

10. A general construction management textbook, a construction safety text, and an estimating reference. Several long-established texts are commonly assigned in construction management programs — among them Halpin and Senior's Construction Management; the Sears, Sears, Clough, and Rounds Construction Project Management; Barbara Jackson's Construction Management JumpStart for readers coming in cold; Jimmie Hinze's Construction Safety; and Peurifoy and Oberlender's Estimating Construction Costs. Check current editions and publishers before buying or citing — these books have been revised many times and authorship has changed across editions. For unit-cost and productivity data, RSMeans publishes annual cost data that most estimating departments keep on the shelf; treat any published unit cost as a starting point requiring local adjustment, never as an answer. For: students building a shelf; practitioners who want one authoritative reference per topic.

A note on how to read all of this

You do not need to read any of these before Chapter 2. What you should do is pick one — the OSHA construction standard is the highest-value single choice — and spend twenty minutes in it this week, looking up something specific about a building you can see. The habit of going to a primary source instead of to somebody's summary of it is the difference between a manager who knows things and a manager who has heard things, and it is worth more in an argument than confidence is.