The phrase "a sort of handbook" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when describing a resource that provides guidance or information, but is not a formal or comprehensive manual.
Example: "This book serves as a sort of handbook for beginners looking to understand the basics of gardening."
Alternatives: "a type of guide" or "a kind of manual".
The men quote liberally from "The Old Farmer's Almanac," a sort of handbook for life on the lowlands.
KimeCurran gives a good impression of what some of those truths may be: It's the book I hand to friends when I know they're struggling with a decision, because to me it's a sort of handbook to finding your way in life – and not always the way that the "stifling conventions of provincial life" dictate.
Later she writes that one of her husbands (presumably the same one) used to suggest to her: "When you're about fifty you ought to write a sort of handbook to teach women how to live in peace with the man they love, a code for life as a couple".
In the last month, galleys of "The Power of Karma," a book by Mary T. Browne, a psychic, have been circulating in the style world, serving as a sort of practical handbook for the karmically deprived.
The Cabinet Manual, a sort of constitutional handbook, says that "The Sovereign would not expect to become involved in any negotiations".
I know all this from her books, principally the 1975 Pulitzer Prize-winning "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" and also "The Writing Life," a sort of memoir cum handbook in which she sets out to tell "the complex story" of the writer's "mind at work" and exhorts fellow artists to "examine all things intensely and relentlessly".
The handbook, a sort of how-to guide for following the new rule, opens with a preface by Warren Buffett, channelling a freshman-composition teacher: "Write with a specific person in mind.
Though the race rules insist that competitors "do not knock on strangers' doors" for help with photos ("People don't like that," the race handbook admonishes), contestants often develop a sort of camaraderie with race onlookers.
"When I wrote The Transition Handbook (published in 2008) I was working up to the Energy Descent Plan, a sort of blueprint for the development of any community.
