A Consuming Experience

For anyone who's not yet heard, In Pictures are "for a limited time" offering free downloads of books in PDF format on a variety of basic Internet/Web and computer-related topics such as HTML and CSS, Dreamweaver 8, Photoshop CS2, including Web programming subjects like MySQL, PHP, Perl, and even Microsoft Office software like Access 2003, Excel 2003, Word 2003. They've not forgotten open source office productivity programs either, with books on OpenOffice software such as Writer. At a more basic level there are books on e.g. Windows XP, Mac OS X Tiger and Linspire Five-O. See the InPics site for their full list of books.

Their philosophy, as is evident from their name, is to base their books on pictures not text, which many beginners will welcome. I've downloaded a few of the files and though I've not read them all cover to cover yet they look excellent for the beginner, and of course the focus on pictorial tutorials makes them much less intimidating than very wordy books. Certainly those new to blogging could do worse than download the HTML and CSS book, for instance. Obviously the more advanced won't find these books as helpful.

Each "screen-quality" downloadable PDF file is free, a print-quality file costs US $3.95 and you can buy a hard copy spiral bound copy of the book for US $14.95 - a very sensible tiered approach.

If you're interested do download them while you can, I'm not sure how long they'll be free for.

(Via Creative Commons blog)

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