An apparatus and method for dynamically selecting a beamforming codebook and hierarchically generating beamforming codebooks is provided. According to one embodiment, an apparatus includes a channel estimation processor configured to receive a signal using a current beamforming codebook in a current beam sweeping period; a look-up table configured to store a plurality of beamforming codebooks; a state abstraction processor connected between the channel estimation processor and the look-up table, and configured to determine a codebook index based on a current channel condition as a function of the received signal and the current beamforming codebook, and select one of the plurality of beam sweeping codebooks in the look-up table as the beamforming codebook for the next beam sweeping period based on the codebook index.