Lack of adequate documentation is frequently cited as a shortcoming of open source applications and platforms, but, for the popular choices, there are surprisingly good, free online books available. We round these up on a regular basis here at OStatic, and in this post you'll find five online books that you can jump right into. They introduce basic concepts for getting started with Linux, Firefox, Blender (3D graphics and animation), GIMP (graphics), and the OpenOffice suite of productivity applications.

Even if you have the perfect idea for the next Great American Novel, getting it down on paper is never easy. While you could always use standard word processors like OpenOffice Write or AbiWord, they don't have the bells and whistles that make writing books, manuals, and theses as easy as possible. Fortunately, there are a few open source applications that help budding authors get stories out of their heads and into the hands of readers.

Kabikaboo - This recursive writing assistant is perfect for managing large documents, technical manuals, and long novels. It arranges data in tree-form so parent modules, their children, and their grandchildren can be easily moved around and rearranged. Though Kabikaboo won't help you with text editing, it's perfect for getting your thoughts in order before diving into a complicated writing project.

Have you hit a brick wall when working with Ruby on Rails? Do you want to understand what is going on behind the scenes in your Rails application? Are you looking to squeeze the best possible speed out of your Rails apps? Advanced Rails might well be the book you're looking for.

Ruby on Rails has become, over the last few years, the latest hit among Web application developers. While it is often compared with Perl, PHP, and Java, Rails is not a programming language.