I update that book, and although I appreciate the recommendation, I have to say that it wouldn’t do a good job of replacing the manual. It’s a book of tutorials focused on specific scenarios, and even though it’s over 400 pages long, it doesn’t (and can’t) come close to covering everything. It does cover a lot of the basics, but if someone wants a printed reference that lets them look up a detailed description of almost any feature in Photoshop, that book isn’t going to be enough.
Sadly there don’t seem to be many good offline references that I know of. People used to write that kind of book 20 years ago, but as software got complex it became overwhelming for any author to keep up. A detailed Photoshop reference book today would have to be well over 1000 pages long, like the old multi-volume Final Cut Pro printed manuals were. Many companies, including Adobe, find it much easier to update the online help files on the server.
It might be worth searching in the Ideas section of this community to see if there is an existing feature request to bring back the single PDF that Adobe used to upload that contained all the Photoshop help files, because that could be read offline.
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