TITLE: Which resources are available to self-study GAP?
QUESTION [22 upvotes]: Background: This year I'll do another Group Theory course ( Open University M336 ). In the past I have used Mathematica's AbstractAlgebra package but (although visually appealing ) this is no longer sufficient (i.e. listing subgroups of $S_4$ takes ages). So, I want to learn more about GAP. I worked through beginner tutorials that I found via the GAP website. Currently, I am not making much progress with GAP. The reference manual does not help me much at this stage.
Question: Which resources are available to self-study GAP? How does one become proficient in GAP? What ( books, tutorials ) should you study?

REPLY [8 votes]: A book called "Computer Algebra Handbook" by Grabmeier, Kaltofen and Weispfenning (eds.) (2003) includes some advanced topics in group theory and examples of code that you can use with GAP. 
In particular, this book has chapters:

"Computational Group Theory" by Charles Sims
"Algorithms of Representation Theory" by Gerhard Hiss
"Computer Algebra in Group Theory" by Gerhard Hiss

and also a 6 pages long section on GAP by Thomas Breuer and Alexander Hulpke, referring to GAP 4.2 (March 2000) which was the current version at the time of writing. I did not find any examples of the GAP code in the book, but I have no accompanying CD which might contain some. Anyhow, for code examples I'd suggest to use more modern sources.
Another interesting book is "Handbook of Computational Group Theory" by Derek F. Holt, Bettina Eick and Eamonn A. O'Brien.