FLOSS Manuals Adds Workbooks to its Mix of Free Tutorials

Regularly, we at OStatic compile documentation and guidance resources for popular open source platforms and applications. For example, you can find our latest collection of free, online books on open source tools here, including guides that can get you started with Blender, Audacity and more. It's worth remembering that one of the most common critcisms of open source platforms and applications is the lack of official documentation. One of the best ongoing projects for producing free open source-related documentation is FLOSS Manuals. Now, the site has added an interesting new type of guide to its mix: workbooks.

FLOSS Manuals provides free online guides to many open source applications, including this one on Mozilla's powerful Thunderbird email client.  Now, though, you can also learn to use Thunderbird through FLOSS Manuals' step-by-step workbook, available here. The workbook consists of a series of educational challenges designed to teach you essential Thunderbird skills.

Similarly, FLOSS Manuals offers a new workbook for the slick audio editing and management platform Audacity. It's available here.  "This workbook is designed to help you learn about Audacity by providing you with information on how to complete specific tasks," the introduction notes.

In addition to workbooks, of course, FLOSS Manuals provides many outstanding complete manuals on open source tools. Here are just some of them, with links:

One of the best guides on FLOSS Manuals, which will be of interest to many browser users, is a complete guide to Chromium--the open source core of Google's Chrome browser. The guide walks through the differences between Chromium and Chrome, provides installation guidelines for all major operating systems, and much more.

In case you're not a Handbrake fane, here is a free guide to Handbrake from FLOSS Manuals, which is one of the best open source applications for working with video and DVDs. FLOSS Manuals also has an excellent, free guide to VLC Media Player, one of the very best open source media players.

 FLOSS Manuals also has by far the most accessible free introduction to Inkscape's main features, found here. Inkscape is a powerful graphics and vector drawing tool.

At the FLOSS Manuals site you can also find a good, concise, free online guide to installing Blender on Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux, found here. Blender is one of the best graphics and animation products around, and it's free and open source.

You can also find a complete guide to basic Internet security at FLOSS Manuals.  If you're at all interested in mastering good open source applications, FLOSS Manuals is a treasure trove of resources. Check it out.