Alex Moskalyuk writes "According to O'Reilly Publishing's Web site, the missing manual series was started after many software publishers decided to drop the practice of including manuals in the boxed set. Supposedly, the same information could be retrieved from the Web site or help file, but those uncomfortable with the manufacturer's site, or those with pathological fear of reading anything that follows F1 were left out in the cold. So it's understandable that missing manuals exist for Windows, Mac OS X, Dreamweaver MX and other products packed with features that are not easy to grasp through naive experimentation. But a manual for Google? A manual for the Web service that makes money by creating an interfaces as simple and intuitive as possible? To put it mildly, are they insane?" (Read more below.)
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/29/1741252