One of the great things about open source platforms and applications is that skilled authors often put free books online as guides.

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.

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.

Since its inception, we've tried to make collections of tips, pointers to free tutorials, and advice on the best applications a regular part of the editorial content here at OStatic.

If you're in any way interested in graphics, you're probably already familiar with GIMP, one of the very best of all open source applications and certainly one of the best graphics applications.

Want to learn more about open source? Download some books for free. It doesn't matter if you're new to open source or a long-time user, there is always more to learn about. We scoured the Web for the best open source books. All of these are free books that can be downloaded and shared.

On a regular basis, we at OStatic round up our ongoing collections of open source resources, tutorials, reviews and project tours. Hopefully, you'll find something to learn from here, and the good news is that everything found in this post is free.

The Libre Graphics Meeting brings together developers and users of free software graphics applications, such as the GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, Blender, Krita, the Open Clip Art Library and more. This year the conference is in Wroclaw, Poland and we need to raise money to support travel for all these (often unpaid) Open Source developers to attend.

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.