heya fellaz. The title says it all. I’m thinking of supporting the Blender foundation and buying one of the books, but im not quite sure which to go with.
Should i get the blender essentials or blender for dummies?..I was leaning towards the blender essentials but i’d like to know what you would recommend.
I need something that covers everything in depth from modeling to the finished render. I already know my way around --…just want to know how to apply those things.
-cheers.
I have all four books (Blender for Dummies:RocknRoll: via my local library), and if you want a book for beginners then the dummies book is the way to go…
I have Blender for Dummies and Introducing Character Animation in Blender
I bought the Blender essentials, and it was a real informative book. One of my fav’s though is the 
Introducing Character Animation with Blender
bounce tumble amd splash…
choose your weekspots,
i sound like the guru’s of fims 
nitros,
i just bought the “Blender for Dummies” book and by the looks of it, it should be very helpful to look up certain techniques as you work on your stuff. Of course, there are now many books available that will give you a big advantage and expert knowledge once you have dissected and applied/understood the topics but for most work, the Dummies book should be OK to do the magic
Another “must have” resource is the Cartoon Smart series that covers Blender via video tutorials and depending on how much time you have, you can be a blender master and help me out … down the road
does the BF actually profit on the books or the authors? 
“Introducing Character Animation in Blender” is the introductory book to get you started on Blender. I find the newer books to be, well … newer and more up-to-date, but they can be rather specific [ie focusing on Bullet or Animation].
I wound up buying them all.
I would definitely recommend Harkeyman’s Animating With Blender, at some point in your self-education, because this book focuses on the overall task of successfully executing a complete project.
“How long does it take to actually produce a complete, ~3 minute video in Blender?” It might surprise you to learn that the answer is, “about 3 person-months… maybe longer.”
When you look at a piece of finished work in that light, you realize that there are lots of “project management and organizational” issues that come into play here, that a discussion of pure technical technique will not cover. Harkeyman’s book therefore focuses explicitly on precisely those issues, and in so doing fills-in many practical gaps. He really does take a realistically-sized project all the way from “a gleam in the creator’s eye” to “a finished video,” describing every single step of that process in candid detail. (“Priceless.”)
Animating With Blender might not be the first book that you choose: if you’re “smack-dab new” with Blender, don’t start here. (You’re not ready yet: you’ll get excessively frustrated.) But when you start to master enough “basic Blender chops” to start getting cocky … read this. You’ll be glad you did. My own quite-limited experience of trying to do this sort of thing professionally, definitely affirms every one of the points (and every one of the “hard knocks”) that the author makes.