Learning paths
Everything on this site is free to read, and the topics are written to stand alone. But a reader who needs to learn a subject rather than look something up is better served by a route than by an index.
Each path below takes existing topics in a deliberate order, adds what to practise at each step, and says what you should be able to do at the end.8 paths, 45 modules.
The foundation path
Piping Components, Materials and Specifications
Read any line list, decode any line on it, say what every component is made of and why, and challenge a specification before it reaches a fabricator.
The components path
Valves, Fittings, Flanges and Specialty Items
Pick a valve for its duty rather than for the drawing, understand why most flange leaks are assembly rather than hardware, and know what a fail position decision is actually deciding.
The drawings path
Reading P&ID, PFD and Isometric Drawings
The highest-leverage skill on a project. Learn to read the documents every discipline argues in front of, and to know which one governs when they disagree.
The project path
Practical Workflow and Field Coordination
How a design becomes a plant — and how the handover, the permit and the inspection regime decide whether it keeps running safely for forty years.
How the line moves and what holds it
Piping Layout, Flexibility and Support
The half of piping engineering that sits between the specification and the drawing. A hot line grows a long way and restraining it produces a force large enough to destroy whatever is holding it, so the route, the restraint scheme and every support on it are one decision rather than three. This path works through that decision, out to the machine nozzle that usually turns out to be the real constraint, and ends with the layout and access choices a unit is judged on long after handover.
What an inspector may reject, and on what authority
Piping Fabrication and Testing Inspection
New-construction quality control on process piping, built on ASME B31.3 Chapters V and VI with ASME Section IX. Not the in-service inspection of plant that is already running, which is where API 570 lives, but the inspector on a fabrication yard or an EPC site deciding whether the weld made this morning may stay in the line. The subject is not welding. It is authority, evidence and the decision to accept or reject: where the right to stop work comes from, what the qualification file actually covers, what the code requires of the work and of the examination of it, and what has to be in the dossier before any of it can be handed over.
Getting it built, with these people, by Thursday
Piping Erection and Site Supervision
The execution side of piping construction, which is a different competence from understanding a project rather than a deeper version of it. Course 4 explains what a permit is and why proving an isolation matters; this is the person who signs on for a crew of fourteen at seven in the morning, under a permit somebody else wrote, with three spools, one crane shared with the civil contractor and a tie-in window that closes at four. Sequencing, lifting and the hours a spool spends unsupported, the diameter-inch the whole industry is measured and paid in, working in a live plant, and the records that decide much later who pays for what.
The whole Body of Knowledge, and how to find it under exam conditions
API 570 Exam Preparation
Preparation for the API 570 Piping Inspector certification exam, built against the published Body of Knowledge for February, June and October 2026. The BOK is not one book — it spans eleven documents, and this covers every examinable item in all of them, including the parts it explicitly excludes so that no time is wasted revising them. One part of the exam is open book, so part of the skill is knowing where an answer lives and finding it under time pressure; that is taught here as deliberately as the calculations are. API 570 is awarded by the American Petroleum Institute and nothing here confers it.
How the paths relate to the topics
A path holds no teaching of its own. Every module points at the topics that already teach it, so following a path and browsing the site reach exactly the same pages — the path just decides the order and tells you what to practise.
That is deliberate. Nothing is held back from the free site to make a paid version look better.