flash (macromedia): I find it incredible that Macromedia will sell Studio MX for over $500 and provide NO MANUALS!! All it includes are pathetic PDF file and even more usless help files. Even Adobe who created PDF's isn't stupid enough to not print manuals. I don't know about the rest of you, but when I need to solve a problem I find the only good way to do it is to crack open an actual manual and page through. I find it useless to try to work with a PDF on screen, my monitor has limited space and I can't afford to print out reams of paper.

So now I am faced with waiting for 3rd party books to come out for each of the studio products and then buying them at $40 to $50 each. This is very short sighted and has caused me to order GoLive and Illustrator just so I can use them now and not have to wait 6 months for a "Manual" on how to use them and their new features. Pretty pathetic Macromedia. Does anyone else feel pissed off or is it just me?

As I understand you can buy printed manual from Macromedia .. at extra cost
of course.

The theory, I guess, is to remove the printed manual from the distribution
to keep costs down .. although you cannot tell that from the prices :):)

I agree, the lack of printed manuals with Studio MX 2004 is appalling. I can
only think that most people are upgrading so they already basically know the
programs and they can get by with the minimalist style built in help. But
personally I think it sucks that I had to spend another $100 to buy Macromedia
manuals (and that was just for flash and dreamweaver, I haven't bought a manual
for Freehand or Fireworks since I use Illustrator/Photoshop/ImageReady for such
functions and not surprisingly the Adobe products come with a printed manual.)

This policy does not help the platform grow, it makes it much more difficult
for someone to start out, and thus in the long run is a bad decision.