You may be wondering, why use blender? There are a couple of really good reasons to use blender, the main of which is that blender is free. This perk is what brings many people to blender, but that defiantly is not enough. Blender offers a solution to practically everything you can find in any other high end software out there. And not only does blender do what these other programs do, but it does it well, sometimes even matching their quality.
Blender also offers a free game engine, which over the course of the last year it was drastically rewritten and improved, making blender one of the primary choices for a free, open-source game engine. Which brings me to another point. Because blender is open-source, there are many different builds of blender that people have worked on to do specific tasks, or plugins that you can get for your build. This fact means that if there's somthing you wish blender had, or could do, that it doesn't already, chances are someone out there has it made.
This is great and all, but where to start? At first blender can seem a strange and forien place, even to expierenced animators. I've compiled a list of websites that will help you get familiar with blender.
Blender 3D: Noob to Pro is an excellent starting place for people new to blender. The site gives a quick run down of each and every aspect of blender in a clear and understandable manner. The manual talks about everything from molding to python scripting in blender, and even blenders built in game engine.
Wiki Blender Blender's wiki page that contains documents and links to helpful tutorials.
Blender Nation A form for blender users where you can talk to others out there about your problems or questions; and also contains a lot of helpful tutorials.
Blender Artists Another useful form that contains tutorials and such.
Tutorialized This site is filled with links to blender tutorials all over the web.
With these sites you should begin to feel comfortable in blender in no time.
