Oops, apparently I linked to an old version of the manual, didn't realize they finished updating it in the wiki.  For this you should be fine with the old version, but there are a lot of things that are out of date or just aren't in there, so for future reference use the new one.

Main documentation page: http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Main_Page
User guide: http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual

I'll need to fix that in the link list too.  I really need to make it so that page can be edited by everyone....

A great resource for newer things is the change logs for new versions, which will tell you how to use stuff that may not have made it into the manual yet.