Packt publishing give away ebooks, usually one per day. I regularly see Blender and or Cycles books being offered amongst ones covering game engines, Android, IOS, and programming (sometimes Python). E-books are offered in pdf, mobi, epub and other formats. Accompanying source code and or example files are zipped.
Feel free to post up any offers that might be of interest to readers of blenderartists.
Todays free ebook is: Blender 3D by Example
Authors: Romain Caudron & Pierre-Armand Nicq
Published in 2015, using 2.74 going by some screenshots.
15MB pdf, 257MB zip of blends and textures.
It’s available for the next ~21 hours after which the next free ebook will be offered.
10 days of free & complete online access to all their titles. No downloads to keep except example files / source code. Not sure if 10 days from now or from the access date. Otherwise available by a paid subscripton. As before, enter anything resembling an email address during registration.
You know, I am never going to buy another book from these ding dongs again, never never. :mad:
Right now I feel like “oh so you are the sucker that opened up his wallet and bought our books while these other people got them for free legally.”
So I have brought like 2 of their books spending something like USD60 and other people legally get them for free because the publisher routinely gives them away for free, I really feel like a sucker.
FWIW I’m not sure the giveaways are up to Packt entirely. I’ve yet to see any covering CryEngine, or other DCC apps for instance. Stings a bit, but hopefully whatever you bought solved problems in a timely fashion that you’d otherwise gamble on being free sometime in the future.