One of the things that I personally would really like, and I think would help to increase Blender’s exposure AND reduce the number of frustrated users who give up - would be a real nice printed book on Blender. This would be especially cool with 2.3 coming out before too long.
So how can we help? Here are the links for O’Reilly and Sams publishing. Submit a request for a Blender book, and mention that you would buy it <if you would>.
They already are many printed books about Blender, sadly/happyly all of them outdated.
Sadly/Happyly? In the last year the development of Blender has taked such amazing speed that made ALL written materials out-dated… Sure they are still pertinent and teach the basics… but give the latest binary release and the printed copy of the 2.0 manual to someone totally new to blender (cut his Internet access as well) and you will see him craying like a baby in no time. (The GameKit book is more recent than the 2.0 manual, but the GameKit book is not a blender manual (and never was meant to be one).
With the upcoming 2.30 series, practically ALL existing materials that we have now (books, tutorials, articles, gamekits, etc.) will be seriously outdated.
The only way I see to have up-to-date printed material would be to have automatically generated PDF versions of the online manual… and even that wouldn’ t be a perfect solution… there is no human way for the on-line manual to keep the pace.
Yes, there are existing books, yes they are outdated, yes Blender is evolving quickly.
But I don’t think that you would disagree with the idea that having a well written book printed by a “big” tech publisher can only help.
There are other OSS projects out-there that have decent books - primarily in the programming field but also OSS applications. I don’t think there is any reason the same couldn’t be done with Blender.
Of course the book should include the binary for the specific version that the book discusses / has screenshots of.
Exactly! That is why now is a good time to start pushing for this.
That is a nice idea - but personally I don’t mind using a digital book to look up one specific question that I have - but I don’t want to spend anymore time with it than necessary. I like to have a nice printed copy of my reference material to read. I already spend too much time staring at a computer screen as it is!
Plus, having a Blender book being distributed by Sams or O’Reilly is going to help increase Blender’s exposure a LOT more than a PDF file.
