The Poser manual is essential. It is a REFERENCE manual (and many people don't understand that a reference book is something to which you refer). People like Ron who think it is something to prop up a desk are never going to learn from it. It is not a classroom-in-a-book. There is a difference of mental approach between "what does this dial do" and "how do I make this happen". For understanding the features of a program, you need a reference manual. For making things happen (dressing the figure or parenting hair or effectively spot lighting something held in the model's hand) you need a tutorial. See Dr Geep's links. When you ask for help in the forums, please don't just say "!!!!!help!!!!!" in the subject line. Be specific! "Help, my figure is stuck to the floor" or "How do I get shadows to show up on the ground?" or "Why is my background all pixellated?" are the sorts of thread titles which attract the eyes of those experts most able to give advice. It is a wonderful program. It is also a lot of fun. There are threads about being addicted, by those people who play with it and can't stop. They create a morph and then another and then... it is like popcorn. Or they discover the materials room and keep plugging things in and they are worse than a kid in a hardware store. The things they make while playing are often shared with us. I'm thinking of pokeydots and Ernyoka1 and Ajax and Ockham and Little Dragon and PhilC as among the people who have played with the program... and came rushing gleefully back with "look what I did!" This is also a serious art tool used by professionals. But it is better to learn it while you can enjoy being creative, than to have to learn it under deadline for a project. Carolly