es, I am aware of the online docs and have sifted through them. but I have a problem. my pc is not online (I am using my college’s now) I would like to download some files just to get the basics of blender down, you know, what each button does, how to move the camera. simple stuff I know but too a noob it is not. Is there one file I can download to get me started. or will I need to print out all of the online pages.
(sorry if I’m being a pest?)
Go to
http://download.blender.org/documentation/
basically go up one level from the normal link. There’s no security on that section of the server so you can go in and browse around. You should find some compressed files that contain all of the HTML sources.
Then if you want you can download web2hh from
http://www.appletmaster.de/zip/web2hh.zip
which will allow you to create a compiled HTML help file (so long as you’re a windows user) as I have. Much easier to read, all in one place with a full text search facility 
Sam.
Or you can download the documentation in PDF format, which is also very good IMHO. Same link that samtheeagle provide above.