Gnome Intermediate Manual ??

[William Case <billlinux rogers com>]

Hi;

I would like to learn more about the inner workings of Gnome and friends
(e.g. Nautilus, Metacity etc.).

I have been using Gnome as my desktop for three years.  I am familiar
with a lot of the basics, but I don't want to start programming Gnome.
Put another way, I want to get deeper into Gnome than Help and
gconf-editor but not as far as GTK and Application Development.

Something that perhaps tells me where the key files are, what each is
used for, where and why they get there input files, how various elements
are activated (programs, scripts and daemons) and how to change gnomes
performance.

For example, I just went through an exercise getting my icons on my
Trash changed to function using trash_empty and trash_full.  It now
works, but I got it to work by following explicitly a lot of advice from
the mailing list, forum and irc.  I am still not sure of the whys and
wayfors of what I did.  I have gathered together advice on how to change
the colour of my windows title bar.  It is not too difficult to follow
once put together in one place.  I now have some minor panel fixes
and/or experiments I want to attempt but I would rather not work blind.

Is there a manual, site or tutorial that covers this middle ground
between beginner and developer?

-- 
Regards Bill
Fedora 9, Gnome 2.22.3
Evo.2.22.3.1, Emacs 22.2.1