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I posted this to a similar question on r/geologycareers awhile ago. Similar info as others, but a bit more detailed

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Oh, the stories I could tell about this subject. However, rather than get myself into trouble, I will give you a good book recommendation that chronicles the story of the search for diamonds in the Canadian Arctic. This covers some of the stuff you are asking.

• Barren Lands: An Epic Search for Diamonds in the North American Arctic by Kevin Krajick
  
  You’re basically familiar with the main components already on a how to become a junior. There’s a few different pathways to actually running a junior mining company, but they all basically fall into two categories:
  
  

1. be an entrepreneur
   
   

• 2. work for an entrepreneur
     
     I’ve in been in the business since the late 90’s and have worked with majors and juniors. While I have been a self-employed consultant at times, I don’t consider myself that much of risk taker to actually start an exploration company. I’ve been around enough of these personalities and talked with successful ones and not-so successful ones to provide some high-level advice.
     
     The tl;dr version is:
     
     

1. do some grassroots exploration; find something interesting
   
   

• 2. stake the claims
     
• 3. attend PDAC; talk to juniors with a geographic fit or commodity class to your property
     
• 4. get someone interested; sign a buy-in deal, where they invest into further exploration for an increasing ownership stake
     
• 5. sell off your majority stake in the property, but hold on to a royalty deal
     
• 6. rinse and repeat
     
     The best way I found to explain (and to relate) the junior exploration business is to think of it as a very niche branch of investing in real estate. No matter the technical details of a project, the end result is a land deal. Someone is investing capital for a piece of land that has the potential for higher economic value if developed (i.e. a mine is built).
     
     Now comparing the junior exploration industry to real estate brings into a comparison where investment capital comes from.
     
     
• Private money
  
• Public money
  
  Public money is basically most of the companies that set up a booth at PDAC. These companies are listed on the TSX or TSXV and are soliciting the public for investing capital by offering shares in their companies.
  
  Private money basically comes from all the wealth management groups or hedge funds. Look up the various companies that have set up shop on Bay Street.
  
  To access these sources of money isn’t straight forward. It does require some networking, which requires time. The other aspect is that you will need to find a lawyer that can help with drafting contracts and various other agreements.
  
  This is how I would approach this situation if I were a 22-year-old fresh geology grad, with the intent of owning my junior mining company.
  
  

1. Work 5 years; for a few different juniors on a few different projects. Save some money.
   
   

• 2. Take that saved money and the knowledge gained to find some prospective ground that you can stake a claim or buy into. With about $5000 to $10000 you can self-finance a small exploration program. Review the claims and geology on the various provincial websites. Find an area that might have had historic mining, historic exploration, similar geology to a new ore deposit model..etc. You could connect with a local prospector and strike up a deal. Offer your services as geologist for free for some type of back-end deal.
     
• 3. Through out this time period, continue networking. Become familiar some VP of Exploration of various companies. Seek out some gray-hair geologists. Maybe bug a former Thayler Lindsley or Bill Dennis award winner for advice.
     
• 4. Between networking and finding your “own project”, you should be able establish a connection with someone directly or who knows someone that would be willing to listen to your story on your project. That person will be your first investor and you’re off to the races.
     
• 5. You’ll also need to be an avid reader. You’ll need to pick up books on contract law, public markets, take some short courses at conferences, work on your public speaking.
     
     In terms of direct sources of information, Edumine.com has a lot of online coursework and webinars. I’ve taken a few and they are pretty decent. I wouldn’t spend too much money here, but if there’s a specific topic you want to learn more about, it might be worth the cost.
     
     Sedar.com; Every publicly traded company in the minerals business publishes a NI 43-101 report on a project. If you want to get some great background info, this is a good place to go. Look up a claim map, find the company name, go to their website, find their project name, look up the NI 43-101 on that project.
     
     Short Courses at Conferences; Roundup/PDAC/CIM and various provincial conferences will have short courses where you can get an infodump quickly on a specific topic. For instance at Roundup this year, there was a short course called “Capital Markets for Geologists”. Basically, it was a mini-mini-investment MBA for geologists in a two-day course.
     
     There’s another subset of this discussion I haven’t even touched. Many, many junior mining companies are simply shell companies. They are only setup for accounting purposes. People play the stock market game by moving projects in and out of companies, selling and buying shares, and even changing their company name to match the investing euphoria of the day. For example, add “Cobalt, Blockchain, or Cannabis” to your company name and watch your share price skyrocket.
     
     Anyway, there’s all I’ve got for now. I’ll pop back in periodically and see if anyone asks anymore questions.

It really depends on what your goal is for the reference and if you have any further education or learning goals beyond it.

The Management of Mineral Resources book will help you understand the decisions of you company executives and provide decent insight into what decisions may be coming next depending on the economic and financial environment, but is weakened in its overall usefulness in that all the problems given and solved are already all pre-scoped, and that some of the advice and direction can be ludicrously wrong from operation to operation. On top of that the information aggregation and decision making process is all about 3-4 levels above the actual operations, and so will be completely different to anything you are likely seeing currently or in the near-to-mid future.

The Mine Manager's Handbook is useful to understand the Mine Manager's decision and process (the obvious answer, I know), but I suspect from looking through the contents pages it is mainly about dealing with constraint and polling responsible parties while providing direction rather than identifying, solving, and optimising approaches to issues.

A more general reference like Operations Management for Competitive Advantage is so general that you will often wonder how you could apply it to your current circumstance (and examples in books like that are almost exclusively manufacturing or supply-chain related), but gives you the insight into the driving factors of decisions from the bottom-up. This is the book if you want to understand how the blast crew, mining maintenance planning, mineral process group, grade control, et al. manage to actually create a final product in a reasonable time, cost, and continuously. So it is a book about the individual steps to The Dance that is the many hundreds of daily interactions and compromises that make an operation function, while the Mine Manager's Handbook is about choreography and managing the dancers, and the Management of Mineral Resources is about producing and selling the music video the dance is in. Hopefully that analogy isn't too forced or ridiculous.

On a personal front, I tend to dislike the first kind of book as it is designed around MBAs coming in without a great understanding of the industries that are being written about (so, for people focused on business, rather than people who focused on an industry then wanted the business knowledge). The second kind of book is a useful reference on the various groups that need to be managed, but (likely) focuses on directing, managing, and integrating their output rather than understanding or producing the outputs, and often times most of the information that the book contains could be easily had at any time with a simple question at work (and if the question are discourage then you have a useful bit of info about your corporation and your value in it). And the last kind of book is a good learning resource, and useful to the times in your career where you may be in other industries, but requires a lot of personal thought on "where the hell does this apply in what I am looking at?"

Operations Management is pretty neat and useful stuff to go into and study and is one of those fields where so many people think they know what is going on (because they have studied Project Management) but are usually unaware of the real driving factors and directions.

My advice; pick one of the metals and dial that in first. Once that is settled, you can get more ambitious with multimetal processing. Start with gold/silver IMO. I've never heard of a iron mine making a real go of things with < 500 tonnes per hour at iron prices under $110/tonne.

An overall good start would be the SME mineral processing handbook.
https://www.amazon.ca/Mineral-Processing-Handbook-Norman-Weiss/dp/0895204487

The SME's Gold Extraction book is pretty good too.
https://www.amazon.ca/Chemistry-Gold-Extraction-Second/dp/0873352408

Generically speaking, a used small scale gold-only extraction plant, excluding any mining/digging equipment, will run about 1 Mil$USD per 100 metric tonnes processed per day. A plant using just physical methods will be cheaper (aka the plants on that gold rush show).

As stated by others, I can't stress enough about getting representative grades of each element and their associated minerals first. You risk a lot of time and money if you dont.

Multi-metal pyro is risky (health wise) so heads up. Multi-metal flotation will have a lot of different chemicals involved and require a realtime balancing act of the other other parameters at each stage... even the size of the air bubbles, down to differences in microns, matter.

Good luck. You're certainly going to need it.

Ok, here's a list of books that might interest you.

• [Introductory Mining Engineering] (http://www.amazon.com/Introductory-Mining-Engineering-Howard-Hartman/dp/0471348511/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412111081&sr=1-1&keywords=introductory+mining+engineering) as others have mentioned is a good, not too technical introduction to mining engineering and the industry as a whole.
  
  
• [Mining Explained] (http://www.smenet.org/store/mining-books.cfm/Mining-Explained%2C-11th-Edition/9041) is a good little overview of the industry, I believe it was written as an introductory guide for investors.
  
  
• [The Deep Dark] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Deep-Dark-Disaster-Redemption/dp/0307238776) is about the Sunshine Mine disaster. It is a well written book that reads like a novel. It gives a good overview of hardrock mining techniques in northern Idaho, but is more focused on the people, the disaster and the recovery efforts.
  
  
• [The World of Mining] (http://www.amazon.com/World-Mining-Richard-Woldendorp/dp/0415671892/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412111733&sr=1-1&keywords=the+world+of+mining) is more of a photography book, but it has a lot of great contemporary pictures from mines around the world.
  
  
• [Deep Enough] (http://www.amazon.com/Deep-Enough-Working-Stiff-Western/dp/0806125292/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412110097&sr=1-1&keywords=deep+enough) is the memoir of a man from an affluent New York family that decides to go to the western US in the early 1900's, where he ends up working in mining. This is a good one if you're interested the culture of a 1900's mining camp as well as the technical aspects.
  
  
• [Trapped] (http://www.amazon.com/Trapped-1909-Cherry-Mine-Disaster/dp/0743421957) is about the 1909 Cherry Creek mine disaster at a coal mine in Illinois.
  
  
• [The Making of a Hardrock Miner] (http://www.amazon.com/making-hardrock-miner-experiences-molybdenum/dp/0831071168/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412110431&sr=1-1&keywords=the+making+of+a+hard+rock+miner) is similar to Deep Enough, but written in the 1970's.
  
  
• [Mines, mules and me in Mexico] (http://www.amazon.com/Mules-Mines-Me-Mexico-1895-1932/dp/0816506264/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412110933&sr=1-1&keywords=mines+mules+and+me+in+mexico) similar in style to Deep Enough, it was written by a mining engineer that was working in Mexico before and during the Mexican Revolution.
  
  
• [Grasberg] (http://www.amazon.com/Grasberg-richest-deposit-mountains-Indonesia/dp/0965289001) is a historical account of the discovery and development of the Grasberg mine in Indonesia.
  
  
• [The Roar and the Silence] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Roar-And-Silence-Shepperson/dp/0874173205) is a historical account of Virginia City, Nevada which was the most advanced and affluent mining camp of its day. It follows Virginia City from a gritty mining camp, to a city whose influence rivaled some of the biggest cities of its day, through its slow fade into obscurity.
  
  
• [Out of the Fiery Furnace] (http://www.amazon.com/Out-Fiery-Furnace-History-Mankind/dp/027100441X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412110707&sr=1-1&keywords=out+of+the+fiery+furnace) is a look at how world history was shaped by mankind's discovery and utilization of different metals. It discusses how mining techniques have evolved over time.

I would recommend the hard rock miners handbook which is free. Underground mining methods is also a good book and easy to follow.

What have you graduated as? You can get some good basics by signing up to EduMine (no $) and get a few free online materials that are a good starting point for an absolute beginner. You question is probably too broad to get everything online though, I'd suggest that if you've got a few hundred bucks to splash out for a decent underground text like http://www.amazon.com/Underground-Mining-Methods-Fundamentals-International/dp/0873351932

Not sure how modern you are looking for, but "The making of a hardrock miner" by Stephen Voynick (published in 1978) is a good read if nothing else. A little dated in many ways, but an excellent look at mining metals in the western US nevertheless.

https://www.amazon.com/making-hardrock-miner-experiences-molybdenum/dp/0831071168

A book about the history of fraud, treachery and thieves in the industry can be found here:A hole in the ground with a liar at the top

There's also another title that tells more stories about the workers in artisan diamond mining: Diamond a journey into the heart of an obsession

As far as books that get more technical, Introductory Mining Engineering would be a good start.

If the business and economics are more what you're interested in, a quick google search for "mining white papers" should yield a whole pile of results. Most of them being written by some consulting houses such as E&Y, KPMG, McKinsey, et al.

Let me know more what you're looking for. Mining Engineer here who loves to read. =)

"Extractive Metallurgy of the Rare Earths" by Gupta et al is essentially the textbook on it. Considering its publication date, its extremely thorough, but doesn't include some very important new developments in separation tek made in the last few years.

For the geology side, this book: http://www.amazon.com/Rare-Earth-Minerals-Chemistry-Mineralogical/dp/0412610302 is excellent.

Its important to note that rare earth deposits are extremely variable. There are numerous types of deposits with different ore minerals in different geologic environments. They will all require special consideration and the mining and separation processes needs to be tailor-made to the specific deposit.

Let me know if you have more questions.

Source: I was the geologist at Mt. Pass until we went bankrupt.

The other commentators here are right, you're bringing a knife to a gunfight. Read this book, then pay a lawyer who specializes in oil and gas (your family lawyer can probably get you an in-state referral) $300/hr to help you. Aggessive, competent lawyers are worth the money assuming that you have enough land.

http://www.amazon.com/Oil-Gas-Law-Nutshell-5th/dp/031418497X

SME Handbook

Hartman Book

Used both while getting my Mining Engineering degree. They are both really great for what you want but I would go with the Hartman Book. It's cheaper and does just as well.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BCJW42U/
These have been the most comfortable to my feet

Thanks for the reply. Regarding operations management, I found this:
https://www.amazon.com/Management-Mineral-Resources-Creating-Business/dp/0873352165

Though maybe you were talking about some more general text on management?

Otzi actually probably smelted ore, he had arsenic in his bones at a level that is consistent with copper smelting, rather than working native copper. Unless he lived next to a smelting operation, he was probably personally involved in smelting. Otzi is frequently portrayed as a "cave man", but he was living in an era where agriculture provided a reasonably good standard of living, there were sizable villages and long distance trade.

The Horse, the Wheel, and Language covers culutral development in Eastern Europe during this time period, they were using ores as low as 1% copper during this general time period, and deforesting considerable areas to provide fuel.