The TOC Handbook, edited by James F. Cox III and John G. Schleier and published in 2010, is the most comprehensive single-volume reference for theory-of-constraints methodology. It collects contributions from leading TOC researchers and practitioners, including eliyahu-goldratt, eli-schragenheim, and h-william-dettmer, making it the closest approximation to a canonical TOC textbook that the field possesses.
The Handbook covers the full range of TOC tools and domains. Chapters address five-focusing-steps in manufacturing and service environments, the complete thinking-processes suite — current-reality-tree, evaporating-cloud, future-reality-tree — and their application to organizational change. Production scheduling using drum-buffer-rope receives detailed treatment, as does critical-chain-project-management and its buffer-management mechanisms. The book extends into TOC for supply chain management, distribution, and finance, including the throughput-world-vs-cost-world distinction that underlies throughput-accounting.
Because TOC literature had been distributed across Goldratt's business novels, practitioner guides by figures like h-william-dettmer and lisa-scheinkopf, and papers scattered across conference proceedings, the Handbook served an important consolidation function. It appeared during the viable-vision-and-mature-toc era, when TOC had developed enough domain-specific variants that a synthesis was both possible and needed.
Published just one year before Goldratt's death in 2011, the Handbook also functions as a record of TOC's state at maturity — a snapshot of a methodology that had expanded from factory scheduling into a general theory of organizational improvement.