A decade ago, information about Second Life® was scarce. Newbies would drop into a Brave New World and get completely confused. There were in-world volunteers — and the Linden Liaisons — to help you out, but often it was hard to assemble a lot of information to get you going. There were already the LL forums, of course, but newcomers might not know where to find them.
Several volunteers quickly started to assemble some material and distribute it via notecards; I was just one of many. Later I thought that it would be best to offer the notecard both as a blog entry, but also as an in-world notecard dispenser — the latter was thought to be something useful for people who were building areas for newbies. And, finally, the small Guide itself became an in-world presentation that I used often to do some classes for newbies — a copy of that presentation is also online on my blog.
Times change. eReaders started to appear, but it was probably thanks to the Amazon Kindle and the Apple iPhone, both launched in 2007, that the way many people started to read things was definitely revolutionized. Instead of looking at guides in HTML or printing PDFs, people now read them on their mobile phones. So, well, for the 10th anniversary of my old guide, I brought it up to date — while still keeping the spirit of the original text — and uploaded it to the Apple iBooks Store and the Google Play Store. It’s free!
So, if you’re new to Second Life, and are used to have your phone/tablet/eReader lying besides the computer on your desk, you might prefer to read the Beginners’ Guide on it instead.
