Books. There are so many. Many are copyright...Brian Price's armour making volume, or Stone's Glossary are in print. I recommend them. It seems that nowadays anybody with a little bit of skill or knowledge seems to say to himself...gee, I could self publish this stuff. And that is excellent, but lets face it, your book can get lost in the Amazon Noise! Many of them are just picture books, coffee table books which look good but are not really very valuable if you want to really get into making armour. Stylistic variations are often more the perview of antique dealers or artists rather than armourers, such books are excellent and beautiful. David Edge's book about the Knight in the Middle Ages, for instance, is THE go-to book to make sense of all the styles and types of armour which were used throughout Europe, but good luck finding results of an assay on the metal, or a decent picture of the strap work which holds it all together inside!
Many of the older ones are treasures from old bookshops,many were written by curators, and include catalogues of collections. Some catalogues are VERY boring...I swear Mr. Edge wrote his fine book after he went cross eyed studying the un-illustrated catalogue of the Wallace Collection. A phone book would be more interesting!
The Internet Archive is the finest resource I know for old, out of print, out of copyright books. It is like the most wonderful library up the road!
These have mostly all been scanned in, photograph by photograph. There are a few missing or damaged pages, a few dog ears, a few coffee rings and bits of cigarette ash on the page when they photographed them. I personally think this does not detract in the slightest from their value.
The internet archive is free. Knowledge is priceless. These are the books I downloaded onto my Kindle before I traveled to Europe to study the subject matter in the museums.
There are lots more than this small sampling! But if any of my readers get through even a fraction of this list, they will have a better handle on the subect than even Gary Gigax!
http://www.archive.org/stream/
http://www.archive.org/stream/
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http://www.archive.org/stream/
http://www.archive.org/stream/
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http://www.archive.org/stream/
http://www.kb.dk/da/nb/
http://openlibrary.org/works/
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