learning salesforce admin - the best way

one of us is leaving his current company to go into consulting. In doing so, he wanted to share the knowledge with me. So he had me replicate the salesforce template that he created. That is, I looked at his developer's edition of salesforce and worked on recreating of all the items in my developer's edition of salesforce. That way I was able to understand all the the nuances that were important for a proper implementation of salesforce.com. Along the way, I asked him about wasn't clear to me, thereby also helping him to improve the documentation. This salesforce template replication is a great way to transfer knowledge in a sysematic way.

-simon thomas