member dimensions initial choice - recommendations

huangyhg

member dimensions initial choice - recommendations
hallo community,
being involved in calculations and drawings mainly i become curious how some of the member properties were chosen by the  senior engineers before starting desing calculations.
i am looking for a guide that contains recommendations how to pick initial member dimensions in the stage before starting calculations. what i mean is, in university we were given some hints regarding slabs, beams, columns (rc, steel), e.g 'the height of a .... loaded ... is recommended to be 1/... of the distance between supports'.
another thing that i would like to find information about is whether there is some practical guideline regarding members resisting shear (braces?, shear walls) like 'recommended seismic-resisting geometry properties of the building'. i see this being useful for discussing with the architect the need of adding/removing such elements in the early stage of the project, before calculations are made.
many thanks for your time
mike

this previous thread has some helpfull information in it... it also has some very funny quotes and comments:
design by rule of thumb
thank you for the link.
unfortunately that thread seems to contain too many rules of thumb and i could not easily filter the useful ones. but it is a good refresher to read after a hard work day ;)
in fact, although i am sure that my question sounds too vague it is a thing that is of real interest to me. because i believe that the vigour with thich the experienced engineers i know maintain the mysticism of the preliminary design is obsolete. i also believe that the more people are able to do these basic checks, the earlier the error detection, hence a  lower cost to fix the mistake.
mike
the experienced engineers in your firm are doing you and the firm a misservice if they are making preliminary design mystical.  preliminary design may be more of an art than science, but any good design firm will have design guides to assist in preliminary   
run enough numbers that you have a good idea what will and wont work before you even start, and then master material costs, availability, and labor requirements for all the different ways you can build things, and you will be off to a very good start.
many thanks for your answers.
hokie66: there are some who would explain in short, but they rarely have the time to.
wikidcool: good points. they even go a little beyond what i was asking, but they need to be considered too.
i searched around and came up with a book called 'simplified design of building structures' (parker/ambrose series of simplified design guides). do you have some impressions regarding this book? or maybe some of it counterparts regarding specific structure types - concrete/steel/wood.
mike