I read through both of these books to see if either or both of them would be good to add to my library of reference books. Both have upsides and downsides (see below) but for someone who is already pretty familiar with quite a few production processes and just needs a reference book I think Chris Lefteri's Making It is the better buy.

Making It: Manufacturing Techniques for Product Design

By Chris Lefteri (2012)

This author has a series of similar books on materials.

Pros:

Covers a wide range of processes from small production to high volume production and finishing.

Writing style was easy to follow and understand.

Includes many cutting edge processes as well as traditional methods.

Cons:

Briefer descriptions are not as complete.

More hand drawn illustrations then pictures of processes.

Prototyping and Low-Volume Production

By Rob Thompson (2011)

This author has written other books on manufacturing, graphics and packaging production.

Pros:

Provides more detailed explanations of various forming, joining and finishing processes via short case studies.

Provides more color photographs of the processes vs. drawings.

Cons:

As the name suggests it only covers low-volume processes and therefore covers far fewer types of operations.

Writing style is harder to follow easily.

Primarily concerned with traditional processes.