The manual is a POS. There's no need for it. The explainations of the character signs are terrible, the don't highlight the differences between the races well enough and hardly touch on the fact that it does make a difference what sex you chose. GameFAQs has some great tutorials to look at.
If you haven't gone too far into the game and you plan on having a character that will use magika, you should restart and make the character fall under the sign of the antronch (sp). They get huge magika bonuses. Because of this huge plus, they don't regain magika when they sleep, but there are very easy ways to get around that!
Here is an excellent FAQ. It's really long, but it explains a lot without revealing any quest details until you get over 100 pages into it. I copied a lot of it to a word file so that I could print it
http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/gam...all/morrowind/