Free Picture-Based Computer Books - OOo, Linspire, Mac OS X, and more

There is no lack of computer books in the world today. There are plenty of technical manuals to go around. The problem is so many of these books are too technical, too wordy, too heavy, and too expensive. Well now there is a site that takes care of all of those problems.

Inpics.net is offering, free-of-charge over 20 computer books in PDF form. These books are light on verbage and heavy on pictures. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, and this is especially true in technical manuals. With a picture showing me what button to press, you can save a lot of words trying to tell me all the steps to find that button in the drop down menus.

From Inpics.net you can download screen-quality PDFs of the books for free, or you can pay just $3.95 for the print-quality PDFs for a roll-your-own deadtree version. I prefer free and environmentally friendly, myself. But there might be times when you need to print some out. Of course, you can always print the free ones, they just won't look as good.

Available books include:

• Computer Basics
• Windows XP
• Mac OS X Tiger
• Linspire Five-O
• Palm Devices
• Microsoft Office
• Access 2003
• Excel 2003
• PowerPoint 2003
• Word 2003
• Publisher 2003
• OpenOffice.org
• Base 2.0
• Calc 2.0
• Impress 2.0
• Writer 2.0
• Web layout
• Dreamweaver 8
• FrontPage 2003
• HTML & CSS
• Web graphics
• Photoshop CS2
• Fireworks 8
• Photoshop Elements 4.0
• Web programming
• MySQL Basics
• PHP Basics
• PERL Basics

The books are released through a Creative Commons liscence which means you can share electronic copies with your friends. And since you are all my friends, I've decided to share all 22 books with you. You can download all of these PDF books here (note: large file - 98MB) To get the individual books, just click on the links above, or visit Inpics.net.

I wish there was a GIMPShop or at least GIMP book in there, but there are quite a few open source topics (Linspire, OpenOffice.org, MySQL), so maybe a GIMP/GIMPShop book is not too far behind.

posted by Chad at 11:35 AM