I love good manuals but they've been a rarity for at least 15 years or so. I picked up a copy of the first X-COM strat guide so I'd always have it handy, because I could see myself still playing that game decades from now if I had a machine capable of running it.
I used to play poker as well as MMORPG's on multiple monitors at once. That's very common in the poker world and the MMORPG world both.