RPM help please

Okay without saying "carl you should use apt-get" can someone help me
with rpm? I'm trying to get gnucash installed its saying I need
libguile.so.9 so I went to rpmfind and see that that's part of the
guile-1.4 rpm. I did a rpm -q on guile and see that I have
guile-1.3.4-16 installed so I do rpm -U guile-1.4<blahblahblah> and it
comes back with a list of dependences that need guile-1.3 to run. It was
my understanding that the -U switch was to Upgrade the package so that
all the programs depending on the old packetage could still run. Up
until this point the steps I've taken so far either worked or I just
gave up and installed from source but I've decided now to really
understand RPM any tricks I should try that I haven't? Any good
"detailed" info on RPM? I'm looking for something with a bit more
explanation than the man page.

Thanks,

Carl P.