Blender Book

[Blikkie]

I do recommend it. It helps to get you up and running with the program and most of its peculiarities. Even though some parts are outdated (yafray integration comes to mind) most of it is still current and interesting (the same can be said of the 2.0 guide, which shares a lot of the tutorials, but is, well, older). Of course you can download (http://download.blender.org/documentation/) the guide as well, but I am a sucker for paper books and the refence sure is helpful, since there are a lot of keyboard shortcuts.

Development of blender hasn't stopped at 2.31, so there have been a lot of nifty and cool features that aren't mentioned in the book yet. Fortunately the changelogs (http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Releaselogs.34.0.html) include instructions and how-to's of these spiffy new features. All in all you can do without, but it is very nice to have. What I would like to see in a future Blender guide is less a collection of tutorials and more of a complete project which is used to explain the various concepts used in the program (like the MAYA 4.5 handbook by Adam Watkins, which I happen to own), but I don't have the time and experience to write it.

Well, I way overtalked myself on this subject, do with it as you like.

[lardlad]

Heartily agree. If the gold standard of manuals is the Stevens TCP/IP or APUE books, then the Blender manual isn't perfect - but it's a great manual. I taught a beginning blender unit this year and spent about six months prepping with that book, and by the time I was teaching it I knew how to resolve about 98% of my students' Blender issues - and the book helped me figure out the other 2%.

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