Begin with Eric Tupper's Introduction to naval architecture. It is the standard first-year text in the British tradition and covers hull geometry, flotation, stability, resistance and propulsion in one readable volume. Be careful when ordering: a different and equally standard American text by Thomas Gillmer and Bruce Johnson, used at the US Naval Academy, carries the identical title Introduction to naval architecture. They are complements rather than substitutes — Gillmer and Johnson are stronger on hydrostatics and stability, Tupper on powering — and together they cover a first year completely.
The reason this field teaches from a handful of comprehensive courses rather than from separate subject books is that its four core problems are coupled to each other and to a commercial requirement. Change the hull to reduce resistance and you change the stability, the seakeeping and the structural loads, and the ship still has to carry a specified cargo at a specified speed for a price. A reading order that treats stability, powering and strength as independent modules teaches the wrong shape of the problem. Assume calculus, basic fluid mechanics and statics or strength of materials before the specialist books; the entry texts largely build them as they go.
The entry stage
Read David Eyres's Ship construction alongside Gillmer rather than after it. It covers framing systems, plating, welding and classification-society survey, and stability arguments are far easier to follow once you can picture the structure they refer to. One honest gap in the path: the dense worked-example stability books written for deck-officer certificates rather than for engineers are a separate literature that our catalogue does not currently carry, so you will need to find calculation drill elsewhere.
The full course
Kenneth Rawson and Eric Tupper's Basic ship theory is the British course in two volumes and the most complete single treatment of the theory: volume one on geometry, stability and strength, volume two on resistance, propulsion and seakeeping. Buy both or buy the set — half of it is half a course. Principles of Naval Architecture is the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers' multi-volume reference and the American counterpart. Treat it as the authority you check rather than a book to work through, and note that a revised series has since replaced parts of it, so the edition you find secondhand may not be the current one.
Resistance, propulsion and the sea
Anthony Molland, Stephen Turnock and Dominic Hudson's Ship resistance and propulsion is the current standard on powering, including the model-testing and extrapolation methods the whole field runs on; read it first among the specialist books. Volker Bertram's Practical ship hydrodynamics is the bridge to computational methods and is unusually honest about which CFD results a naval architect should and should not trust — it makes much more sense after Molland's empirical methods. John Carlton's Marine propellers and propulsion is the definitive single-subject monograph on blade geometry, cavitation, vibration and propeller-hull interaction. Odd Faltinsen's Sea loads on ships and offshore structures is the seakeeping and wave-loads text and the most demanding book in the path; it assumes potential-flow theory and comfort with partial differential equations, and it is where the ship problem connects to offshore engineering.
Design practice, and the small-craft route
David Watson's Practical Ship Design is the classic on the design process itself — parametric estimation, the design spiral, the trade-offs a first sizing has to make — and it comes from a working shipyard career, which is why it belongs before the more academic treatments. Apostolos Papanikolaou's Ship Design supplies the modern methodological framework, covering optimisation and risk-based design. Ship design for efficiency and economy by Schneekluth and Bertram is short and, if you read only one design book, the most directly useful, because fuel and operating cost is now the dominant commercial constraint.
If you came to this from sailing rather than from shipping, Principles of yacht design is the most accessible book here and works a complete example yacht from requirement to scantlings. For the aerodynamics underneath it, follow with C. A. Marchaj's Aero-Hydrodynamics of Sailing, which is not in our catalogue and remains unmatched on sails as aerofoils.
Follow the full path for the stage notes and study questions.
Follow the full ordered path here: Naval Architecture and Ship Design: The Best Books to Read First.
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