who gives free printed reference manuals?

[zxcv]

I'm looking for some more free and interesting free reference manuals.

Some companies, like Intel, will mail your free printed manuals. Does anyone else?

I was kind of rooting for NVIDIA, but so far it looks like a no.

Thanks

[robwhit]

so you want free printed manuals because they're free? Seems like a financial drain on the company to me.

I'd encourage you to get the free electronic copies instead and print them out if you want to stock up on printed manuals. Maybe don't even print them out.

[abachler]

As an engineer I like to collect free reference manuals. It's gettign harder to get companies to provide them in printed form though, since so many people over the years have done just as the OP and taken them just because they are free with no intention of ever actually buying from that company.

[matsp]

AMD does for some products - but it's less than it used to, and getting for example the AMD64 architecture docs in all 5 volumes requires that you ask someone who knows someone at the time when they have just been printed.

It's very unlikely that you will find ANY graphics card docs in hard or softcopy with any great amount of detail. This has to do with many things, including "not revealing how the chip works to the competition".

As a side: When one of the "reps" for the company I used to work for a few years back went to see one of the places that regularly ordered a COMPLETE SET OF EVERY printed manual on the list, they found a light-house. Fair enough, small companies have offices everywhere. But it turns out that they are not at all interested in electronics - it's just a cheap way to get "fire wood" for the heating in the winter. So yes, there are some people who "take advantage".

Other situations was that people in Russia for some reason liked to collect the "Jewel cases" for CD-ROMs with collections of documentation. They would order a CD-ROM for the purpose of getting the Jewel case. Again, using paper-envelopes for the CD-ROM (and clearly stating that on the ordering page) reduces the amount of "loss" from this. Who'd think that it's worth it to sit and order these things...

--
Mats

[zxcv]

Yes guys, thats it alright. My master plan to bankrupt companies by ordering freebies that I wont even pick up.

I couldn't possibly, like you know, be interested in compilers and CUDA/OpenGL. Couldn't possibly have maybe another interest or two. Also, I couldn't possibly also want a list of things that other people might find interesting/needed to get a nice mini resource going.

Wow.... intarwebz....

[CornedBee]

Of course not. And of course, it's absolutely not too much to ask of us to read your mind through the web to find that out. After all, it's not like you didn't give detailed information on your interests:

I'm looking for some more free and interesting free reference manuals.

[robwhit]

I didn't mean to accuse you of anything, just to encourage you to think about whether you would actually use them or not.