I couldn't agree more. Like many great open source tools, it does a good, if not 100% perfect, job of replicating the slick functionality of commercial tools, but once you know what you're doing it gives you the openness and flexibility to get under the good and really make it work for you. Frinstance, Inkscape lets you drop into the SVG source, tweak it (eg changing the path of an included bitmap) and have the results appear in the canvas.
Book or no book, give it a go.

...and I apologize to the world. The problem is that, while SA is a wonderful place to live etc, the political gene pool is way too small and its too easy for some fairly marginal individuals to rise to positions of power. I didn't vote for these jokers BTW - but the opposition is even worse. The Greens are the only (reasonably) sane option.

Thirded. It's the way to go

I thought the site was Flash, but it appears to be all javasacript and HTML, using jquery.

Sounds weird maybe, but try Protege Owl (http://protege.stanford.edu). It comes out of biomedical research but, using the W3C OWL standard, is a brilliant tool for capturing complex knowledge of any kind. I use it to document a metro-wide fibre network (http://www.sabrenet.edu.au).