Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual

This book, created by Mike Okuda and Rick Sternbach, gives full details of the technologies of the United Federation of Planets and gives many working specifications of the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D and its support craft (e.g. shuttlecraft).
The book has the opening quotation "Some men see the way things are and say, 'Why?' I dream things that never were and say, 'Why not?'" by Robert F. Kennedy, and has an introduction by Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek and an afterword by Rick Berman, the producer of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The acknowledgements stretch on for miles.

First published 1991, ISBN 1-85283-340-8.

A ridiculously well-researched book and very fun to read if you have/had any interest at all in ST:TNG. Not only does it go through the technical specifications of how warp drives, transporters, holodecks, and bridge controls are supposed to work, it includes "real-life" notes on how certain things came about (like the GNDN tubes and the "pool table" in Engineering) but it explains how certain technologies work from the creator's point of view (like Mike Okuda's comment on the Heisenberg Compensator or the establishment of Warp 10 as a speed limit). The cross-section map of the Enterprise with the hamster wheel in Engineering and the Porsche parked in the shuttle bay are almost worth the price of purchase alone.