Amen! I tend to be more of a hands on person, so when I can actually pick up a book and thumb through it, it feels more natural to me. As someone who has been accused several times of not knowing how to RTFM, I must say that the online docs are often quite helpful, but that's just not my style of learning. I will give credit to the ActiveState distribution - all of the man pages are available as HTML. It's so nice to be able to just click on a "see also" without having to pull that page up as well. Also, given the sorry state of the laptop I use at work, it's much easier to have multiple books open than windows.