Rating: 
Summary: Buy it if only for the "priceless software"...
Review: "Not a Number is one of the Top 50 companies that will change the industry" -- CGI Magazine Who's Who, 2001. If you think "Blender" is something in your kitchen you use to make smoothies, think again. Not only is Blender a 3D animation package you can use for presentations, video production, or websites, it is a real-time, OpenGL, 3D gaming engine you can use to create your own computer games. It's not the easiest software to use, but it is truly powerful. (Hey, the software is free and the book is really helpful.)In an interview I saw with the gang at Not A Number (Blender's brain trust), they referred to Blender not as freeware, but as "Priceless Software." It's true. This is truly the first Open Source movement that will affect the largest number of people from electronic media professionals to hobbyists. If you want to try before you buy, there is a sample chapter on the Blender/Not a Number website.
Rating:
Summary: Buy it if only for the "priceless software"...
Review: "Not a Number is one of the Top 50 companies that will change the industry" -- CGI Magazine Who's Who, 2001. If you think "Blender" is something in your kitchen you use to make smoothies, think again. Not only is Blender a 3D animation package you can use for presentations, video production, or websites, it is a real-time, OpenGL, 3D gaming engine you can use to create your own computer games. It's not the easiest software to use, but it is truly powerful. (Hey, the software is free and the book is really helpful.) In an interview I saw with the gang at Not A Number (Blender's brain trust), they referred to Blender not as freeware, but as "Priceless Software." It's true. This is truly the first Open Source movement that will affect the largest number of people from electronic media professionals to hobbyists. If you want to try before you buy, there is a sample chapter on the Blender/Not a Number website.
Rating: 
Summary: Essential, but . . .
Review: Although the color printing was impressive and helped me visualize the outcomes of the exercises the instructions often left out a step or two. In addition the short hand notation that is used to refer to short cuts in Blenders was often confusing. That said the book did help me learn the basics with the incredibly cryptic Blender interface.
Rating:
Summary: Not enough
Review: Although the color printing was impressive and helped me visualize the outcomes of the exercises the instructions often left out a step or two. In addition the short hand notation that is used to refer to short cuts in Blenders was often confusing. That said the book did help me learn the basics with the incredibly cryptic Blender interface.
Rating: 
Summary: Doesn't deliver
Review: Don't let the pretty pictures fool you. This guide is poorly written and very hard to follow. The sample files would be more helpful if the tutorials were more complete. Note: THIS BOOK IS NOT FOR DUMMIES. The author must have worked so hard at keeping the book compact, quality suffered. It is densely packed with cryptic text. New terms are introduced in nearly every paragraph without proper definition. Seemingly important concepts, such as S-Meshes and Metaballs, are entirely glossed over without a mention of how. The book may be worth the price for the last 3 chapters: "The Interface," "The Buttons" and "The Appendix." The rest left me disappointed. You may learn just as much about Blender -- if not more -- from the web.
Rating:
Summary: Essential, but . . .
Review: For anyone trying to learn Blender, this book is essential. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have a lot of problems. Firstly, the book covers an old version of Blender and hence doesn't document any of the new features such as NLA. Secondly, it's a very poor translation by someone who clearly isn't a native English speaker. Some of the lengthly passages are almost unreadable. The index is also quite poor. However, as the software doesn't include any documentation and as it's difficult to cull sufficient information from the Internet, I would defintely recommend buying it -- warts and all.
Rating:
Summary: Superbly manufactured manual
Review: For everybody knowing the first Blender guide this manual will be a delightful surprise. It has the paper and print quality of a luxury car advertisement and is quite encyclopedic, expect for the game engine and python part of Blender. For the game engine, they say, a second book will be written, soon. If someone (e.g. an earlier reviewer) finds this book not perfect enough for a newcomer, then one may remember how much fun it was to learn Blender with no tutorial whatsoever, when Blender was first made publicly available. This book together with "The Blender Book" (also from Amazon.com) definitely enable one to create impressive 3D graphics. This one is more pleasing to the eye while the other looks more like a textbook. But as the authors say, much more information is available on www.blender.nl, where Blender has it's home. The chapters are: Quickstart, Using Blender, Mesh modelling, Curves and surfaces, Special modelling techniques, Materials and textures, Lighting, Animation, Particale effects, Python scripting (small), The interface, The buttons. Everyone who likes Blender, will surely like this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Great reference
Review: For those of you who don't know what Blender is, it's a modeling program which can bring results that look like they have been done with a thousand dollar program- only Blender is free. It also has game making support, and although this guide doesn't really cover that aspect of Blender, there is another book similar to it that does. As for this guide, I'd definately recommend buying it if you have the money and are serious about learning Blender. After all, it isn't easy starting out, and it offers a great start for beginners. However, the further you get into it, the more you realize that this truly is just a reference manual. Each chapter shows you a new technique for modelling, lighting, animating, and other things, but never really shows you how to apply it to your own models. One large complaint I'd have to make about this book is how it doesn't show you the "whole thing." And by this I mean each part shows you but one step which would be mandatory for completion of a larger project. Let's take for example the clock tutorial. You load up a near completed clock, and use a technique which allows you to easily put all the hour marks on without the pain of manually placing each one in the correct spot, facing the correct way. Definitely useful, but the tutorial would be so much more practical if they would just tell you how to make the *entire* clock. At any rate, if you go through the entire book and memorize everything, you'll be more than ready for the advanced online tutorials which you'll find on the Blender website. So I suppose what I'm saying is that this is probably the best reference you can buy, but it'll take lot's of practice (with or without the book) to actually make it worth your while.
Rating:
Summary: Knowing is not Doing
Review: I speak as a complete newbie to creating 3d art & animation. However, I have been programming and using computers since the teletype and paper strip days. Blender is a fantastic bit of code. That said, the potential Blender god needs to be aware that you will work, sometimes very hard, to understand and master it. It is no different than any other killer app. You will reap what you sow. Is the Blender Manual perfect? No. Is it helpful? Very. Will it answer your every question? Not a chance. Any book that could cover every aspect of Blender would be thousands of pages. What the book will do is get you started, give you a big peek at some of the things you can do with this great software. It will get you started experimenting. Learning Blender from a book is impossible. Learning Blender with this book beside your keyboard can be exciting. Pros: Shows you how to do some really cool stuff, and the demos on the CD are great. Helps decypher the somewhat cryptic interface. Cons: Really weird layout, the chapters seem to be tossed around in random order, and there can be some pretty big gaps in the how-to's P.S. For those out there whining about the price of the book, it's one of the cheaper user manuals you will find. Go drop $1500 on Adobe or $5000 on 3dMax. Then you'll whine.
Rating:
Summary: Great Stuff!
Review: I use Linux at home takes well designed. It the customers eagerness out of the way by guiding you, literaly holding your hand, threw the process of making a simple 3-d animation of a ball moving across the screen with lighting and shadowing effects. Then it explains the GUI and how to use the program, by constructing simple shapes and items to get a feel for the program. It is worth five times it's weight in gold. Powerful, versitle, and mulit-platformed.
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