As a former mechanical engineer, it depends on your chosen course curriculum. Standard courses that all M.E.'s take generally don't cover topics like this. Instead, you deal at a more fundamental level with courses such as physics, calculus, statics and dynamics, heat transfer, thermodynamics, material sciences, etc. When other majors were allowed to take pretty much any elective, we were required to take 400 level engineering electives. This is where you had the option of choosing courses that would teach this sort of stuff. For example, I took a course in gear design which covered topics related to this. Another engineering elective I took was vehicle dynamics. Robotics courses are often an option for students as well.

As far as texts go, I would just search Google or Amazon for "Machine design". I don't have any particular recommendations because at the time I viewed text books with the same level of excitement as most other students, which is to say none at all. The two books that I did keep after college are the following: 1) Product Design and Development: http://www.amazon.com/Product-Design-Development-Karl-Ulrich... 2) Machine Design: An Integrated Approach: http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Design-Edition-Robert-Norton/d...