Semiconductor fab reading list
Like with most types of construction, there's no one source that explains how a semiconductor fab is built and operates. But there's an enormous amount written about semiconductors and the technology used to manufacture them, much of it excellent and informative, which makes it possible to piece together how fabs work. For those interested in learning more about the process, the sources I found most useful are listed below.
With the exception of Crystal Fire, none of the sources below are especially great for casual reading, but they're where I would start if I wanted to learn more about semiconductor manufacturing and fabs.
Recommended reading
Introduction to Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology by Hong Xiao, 2012
There are quite a few books that cover the basic elements of the semiconductor manufacturing process, but I found this one to be most useful for my particular needs. It provides a great overview of the various steps in the manufacturing process (layering, patterning, etching, cleaning, and so on), how they work, and how they've evolved over time, at a level of detail understandable by the intelligent layman. Books about semiconductor manufacturing tend to be textbooks for engineers who need a deep understanding of the process, and most of them spend much more time on things like the physics of various processes (equations governing diffusion and so on). This book stayed at the right level of detail for someone who wants to understand the manufacturing process but isn’t planning on becoming a semiconductor engineer.
A similar, though slightly less good book that covers the same material as Xiao's is Peter van Zant's Microchip Fabrication. For something more on the "detailed textbook" end, Campbell's Fabrication Engineering at the Micro and Nanoscale seems to be good, but I'm of course in no real position to evaluate it. One major downside to all these books is that they’re over 10 years old at this point, and so they miss many recent process developments.