Particle

Well first of all a short intro to particles. What is particles and what can one do with them? Well particles can be hair, fire, fireworks, starts shooting out and stuff alike. You can use them with a explode modifier for exampel so that the faces of what is beeing exploded will be ripped apart when a particel hit them.
















Exampel of areas where you might wanna use them, Game when lvling up. Campfires. Explostions. smoke. Dust. Underwater sence etc...


If you whant a bigger understanding of particles you should visit this site: http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-246/particles/particle-system-and-types/
and if you whant to know more on how to use them go here: http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-246/particles/ These 2 was realy usefull for me.

This link gives some basic knowledg of particles and have tut's, They are rather old though so they arn't up to date. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Particle_Systems but with a bit of sense you can make the same thigns as they ask for in the tut's.

And this link is for a place where they creat cool stuff with particels: http://download.blender.org/documentation/NaN_docs/Manual2.0/Particles.html It's abit out of date allso but you can manage to make the same stuff with some list ^^