>>13808007Hibbler wrote some pretty decent books, one on mechanics of materials, and another on dynamics. They both are pretty practical in nature, though you will need to know some calculus to understand what's going on. I'd take a look at James Stewart's Calculus: early transcendentals. You don't need to necessarily learn or review a bunch of calculus before diving in to anything mechanical engineering related, but I would at least recommend you're comfortable with doing derivatives and integrals, and have a conceptual understanding of what they actually mean.
Aside from those, mechanical engineering has a lot to do with thermodynamics and fluid mechanics. If you're interested in that stuff at all, Çengel has a pretty good book on thermo along with another coauthor, and he also coauthored a book on heat transfer. I think he also wrote a book on fluids too, but I've used Frank White's fluid dynamics book which I thought was pretty good. I.G. Currie also has a good fluids book, though it's more advanced and a bit more mathematical, geared towards graduate students. But if you end up liking fluids it's a pretty good book. If you're more into the aerodynamics side of things you could check out Anderson's Modern Compressible Flows, or Sengupta's Theoretical and Computational aerodynamics.
I know you were asking more about materials and mechanisms, but I figured I'd list that section on fluids/thermo too because I didn't even realize I liked that stuff until my second year as a mechechanical engineering undergrad. I went into it wanting to design cars. Now I'm two years into my PhD in aerospace engineering, with an eventual goal of working on aircraft design.
