Hi, I am new to Blender.
I see on the blender site that the book is sold out, and a new one is about to be spawned.
Is there any kind of ETA on that?
Do the proceeds of the book help with the development of Blender?
I can give you an ETA on a new Blender book. This one, mine, will be out on February 27th or thereabouts (I’m still hoping for a bit earlier). You can pre-order it at Amazon here:
The proceeds of this book don’t go to the Blender Foundation directly. I donate money to the BF and I think everybody else should also if they can afford it and if they feel they get good use out of Blender. You can do that here, by the way:
http://www.blender.org/cms/Donation___Payment.517.0.html
The last I heard Ton was considering selling this book through the BF e-shop, in which case the BF would profit directly from each sale. However, logistical issues may make that not worth the shipping costs.
There’s another introductory book planned, but I don’t know when that’s due out. You can read about that here:
In the meantime, downloadable pdfs are available for most of the tutorials in the Blender Summer of Documentation docs, and they are all excellent, so I’d suggest you start there.
http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Blender_Summer_of_Documentation
There’s also this free pdf book, Blender Basics, which is another very good introduction:
http://www.cdschools.org/54223045235521/blank/browse.asp?A=383&BMDRN=2000&BCOB=0&C=55205
Wow, thanks for the response.
I look forward to seeing your book!
The next official book from the Foundation, Blender Basics, is still in the editing process. Ton and I are still working on a final schedule. We’ll let everyone know as soon as we know. 
One doubt. I heard that the new Blender 2.5 will have a new interface and new icons. I’m afraid these books are getting old before they are released… 
One doubt. I heard that the new Blender 2.5 will have a new interface and new icons. I’m afraid these books are getting old before they are released…
2.5 is still a little way off I think, but you’re right, this is a difficulty with writing books about Blender, or indeed any quickly-developing open source software. There may be new icons for 2.43 and there are many other additions in 2.43, but everything covered in my book will still apply. My book will be distributed with copies of 2.42 with it on the DVD, so if you’re learning for the first time, you would probably be best off using the copy of Blender that comes with the book, and learning new features as you become confident enough to use them (there’s no problem to have more than one version of Blender installed at once. Many people do). The changes are not so deep that it will be difficult to make this leap.
My book focuses on character creation and animation specifically, so many new features in 2.43 aren’t directly relevant to the content anyway (I don’t talk about the game engine, or fluid sim, or much about compositing, etc…). So most of what I cover is not changed much. (Action modifiers are the only real glaring omission I know of offhand… )
As for icons, that’s a point. But Blender users and learners do tend to get accustomed to adapting to change. If you learn on one set of icons, it shouldn’t be difficult to do the same work with a different set of icons.
2.5 will most likely be 2.5 BECAUSE OF a new interface. That’s why it would get a whole 1/10 version number increase. You bump up the 0.x digit because you’ve caused some kind of break in compatibility. There’s no guarantee that the version after 2.43 will be 2.5. You could still be looking at a 2.44 and 2.45 depending on how things go.
One of the nice things about this upcoming release is that support for themable icon sets is built in – meaning that you can load an icon set while Blender is running. It no longer has to be created when the program is compiled.
On the topic of creating books for such a moving target as Blender development – I know that bugman’s book is not made obsolete by anything in the upcoming release at all. Right now, it seems that Blender’s functionality is being extended but the base functions are pretty solid. Any book that covers basic and midrange functionality (like bugman’s and the upcoming Blender Basics) is going to be relevant for quite some time.
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Great thanks for the info you guys.
I look forward to getting both of your books!
Can’t wait for any books on Blender! I’m working my way up the learning curve…
…and thanks for the links to the SoD PDFs! It’ll give me something to do over the weekend…
…maybe I can save myself $500 and use Blender to make my game sprites instead of forking over the cash for Softimage Foundation… urk! :eek: