Although the actual documentation you get with many open source applications and platforms can feel paltry compared to what you get with proprietary alternatives, many book authors have served up free, online books on open source topics. We round these up on a regular basis here at OStatic, and in this post you'll find seven online books that you can get comfortable with quickly.

"There was a time when I was obsessed with finding good, free, stable, Adobe Flash animation software, because at the time I was also obsessed with Homestar Runner and other online cartoons and I wanted to make my own.

Free and open source software is all about sharing so, prompted by a reader who emailed me last week to ask about books on Linux, I spent some time over the weekend doing research. The result is a short list of books that users - from newbies to gurus - can download and read at their leisure.

The Blender Foundation’s second free-content movie, Big Buck Bunny, is the product of the foundation’s “Peach Open Movie” project, and the results are impressive. Like the previous Elephants Dream movie, this film pushes the technical envelope for the “Blender” free software 3D rendering and animation application; unlike it, it succeeds as pure entertainment.

Safaribooks online were availabe in HTML-View for a long time and were accessible with free software.Now the O'Reilly Safari team has decided to stop this and deliver online books in Adobe flash format only for online reading. As expected gnash does not work. This means reading and browsing O'Reilly books online is no more possible with free software.

On a regular basis, we at OStatic round up our ongoing collections of open source resources, tutorials, reviews and project tours. These educational toolkits are a big part of the learning mission we try to preserve at the site.

One of my projects this fall is to take advantage of online "Open Courseware" classes, for personal and professional development. In setting up my own curriculum, I came across a very nice find: a class on 3D modelling based on the (free software) Blender 3D modelling application.

In new free book the authors of twenty-five open source applications explain how their software is structured, and why. What are each program's major components? How do they interact? And what did their builders learn during their development? In answering these questions, the contributors to this book provide unique insights into how they think.

Blender is an open source, cross platform suite of tools for 3D creation, capable of modeling, rendering, and animating 3D environments. Since Blender is completely free, everyone can download and use it immediately in commercial projects.