I figured I would order this book and download the 30 day trial before I made the full commitment to the program. After about 10 days of reading this book and working with the demo. I went ahead and purchased the full program. I haven't been disappointed!

I think the book is very well laid out, and tells you how the program works. As to the criticism that it doesn't tell you how make Goldmine useful for your purposes, there are some examples of what the writer does in his own company and other examples, but I would assume most people would already have an idea of what they are trying to do before they get to this point. The book does tell you how to do that if you already have an idea of where you want to go.

All that being said, if you are serious about using this tool to its fullest, and your livelyhood, find a knowledgeable reseller, and ask them to help you for a couple of hours filling in the fine points of what you are trying to do.

"Covers the basics but..."
I find GoldMine VERY counter-intuitive and difficult to use. I have used numerous other systems and have 20+ years in the computer industry.

This book covers the how to do many of the details of managing your data in goldmine.

Where if falls (very) short is that is doesn't really give you a road-map to use goldmine, no real best practices and how to at a high level.

There IS great info in this book, but by the time I broke down and bought it I had figured out 95% of what is covered. What I was hoping for was a theory of operation, something to make goldmine easier to manage.

All in all the book is better than the program!

"Details but no overall strategies for managing GM"
Goldmine is very powerful and completely counter-intuitive. This book sheds light on the details of many of the areas of configureation and has lots of helpful information. It does fall short on best practice and usefull methods of using goldmine in a practical fashion.
I have found using goldmine to be a terrible and painful experience, simple things become impossibly complex (like data import) this book DOES address some of these topics.