The Official GNOME development Manual - This is the entire GTK+/Gnome Application Development manual. It is available online in its entirity and is always up to date. - http://developer.gnome.org/doc/GGAD/
Interface Design - Menubars - Article - from a UI Design Perspective - about configuring Gnome to use a Single Context-sensitive Menubar, instead of multiple redundant (one per window) Menubars. - http://home.earthlink.net/~johnrpenner/Articles/SingleMenubar.html