Here is one practical suggestion: find out who makes the equipment that you might be dealing with and scour their websites for information about the equipment. You will want to get familiar with things like the physical sizes of different pieces of equipment, materials of construction, treatment technologies, treatment capacity ranges, treatment performance, piping connections, power requirements, and a host of other things. The goal here is to get familiar, not to gain mastery. You will only gain mastery through years of on-the-job training. Another thing, many manufacturers provide engineering documents on their websites that are worth reading. For this genre, it might range from general hydraulics and general treatment principles to detailed design guides for using their equipment. You should also check the websites of the regulatory agencies that affect this type of work (e.g. EPA, your state's Health Department or similar) and see what documents they have that are relevant.
When I first came out of college, one of my project managers gave me a piece of outstanding advice: he suggested that every day during my lunch break I grab a manufacturer's catalog off the shelf and flip through it. That was the 1980s version of the advice I am giving you. He also suggested that I look up all ASTM, AWWA, etc. standards that these catalogs referenced. I even made copies of engineering guides that I found in these catalogs for my personal library. I still have many of these, although some I have chucked in recent years because I later found PDFs of the same thing. My personal //edit//electronic//edit// library of engineering goodness, collected over the past 20+ years is now over 15 GB. It's only partially organized and some documents I may never need, but if it looks interesting, I download a copy.
============
"Is it the only lesson of history that mankind is unteachable?"
--Winston S. Churchill
![[smile]](/data/assets/smilies/smile.gif "[smile] [smile]")
I am so glad that I asked my question here. 
