I too have found the manual a little less than helpful on more than one occasion (I can't remember what I'm using to prop up my bookshelves; I think it's Sartre's Existentialism and Humanism), and there's quite a lot I've had to discover (like that skewing of the z and x axes upon rotation of the model) that it really would have been helpful had the manual told me that it would be the case. I, however, am a fairly patient person; I worked through the tutorials (boring as anything), read the whole manual cover to cover (even the bits on animating, which I knew I wouldn't be doing), all that... I have a lot of patience for people who can't be bothered to do that, and need a little more in depth help with something they want to achieve, step by step, rather than work through six not very well documented parts of a manual to begin to get a handle on how to do it. I've learned a lot more from the tutorials online and from personal help people have offered than from the manual, really. There's nothing like having a mentor.